Lee Loader

My Lyman scale has always been effected by electrical noise from items mentioned above. I got a anti static mat from Radio Shack to set the scale on. It comes with a jack to plug into a ground circuit in a duplex receptacle. It is large enough to set items you are weighing, I touch the mat before touching the scale to make sure I am discharged. This helped me a lot with my powder measuring.

I used a "borrowed" PACT digital scale for a couple of years and found it to be extremely reliable and accurate. Ended up buying it's near exact mate (obviously made from the same stock as my borrowed PACT) in the RCBS 750 RangeMaster. It's everything the PACT was. In addition to the pair of standard check weights/calibration weights that come with the scale, I have several items that I've established a "check weight" for. The items that get used the most are a pair of paper clips that each weigh 5.8 grains ... perfect for occasional calibration checks when loading .357 mag and below charge weights. My scale is positioned such that the air duct is blocked by a book case, so not air current sensitive, and I've never seen any aberrations due to the florescent lighting. I believe they've solved the issue of filtering out most electrical interference with digital scales.

jd

The Gem 250 will measure to .02 gr and is quite reasonable for this level of accuracy.

I use an RCBS 10-10 as my primary scale. Use an inexpensive digital one to verify. Not sure why, the balance beam had never let me down.

HDMontana wrote:I use an RCBS 10-10 as my primary scale. Use an inexpensive digital one to verify. Not sure why, the balance beam had never let me down.

Oh yea the 1010 design and produced by ohaus in grey long before rcbs bought the rights. I have an original ohaus 1010 rcbs still gave me a calibration kit for free. Great scale.

HDMontana wrote:I use an RCBS 10-10 as my primary scale. Use an inexpensive digital one to verify. Not sure why, the balance beam had never let me down.

Wrong way... the beam scale is by far more accurate and consistent than any consumer grade electronic scale.

Verify the electronic one with the beam scale is fine, but the other way round doesn't work.

I agree. I think I use the digital with the balance beam for peace of mind. I'm a little anal about getting all my hunting rounds to have the exact same powder weight. If the balance beam and digital both agree, then I'm pretty confident in what's getting dumped in the brass. Waste of time? Probably, but it works for me.

I keep known weights with my scales that were compared with beam scale and electronic. we found one of the beam scales at the range about 2 grains off in the range of about 25 gr. Don't know or care what happened to the scale, we just threw it away before it caused a problem.

When using my electronic scale for my own peace of mind I set the known weight on the scale about every 5 rounds to confirm it hasn't drifted. Also the scale will flash calibrate if it drifts 2 tenths if I get lazy and don't check. When the loading block (50 rounds) is full I use a light to look in the cases for variances.

With everything I listed above I have high confidence in my weighed charges for my 243 and 30-06 rounds and would hate to move away from using my electronic scale do to the speed and ease of operation.

All my loads are worked up carefully. pistol rounds and 223 are loaded progressive with it's powder measure, when starting a new batch number of powder I check velocity and accuracy of the load to decide on going through the whole load development procedure.

That all said, this is a condensed version of part of my loading procedure, and my vote is for electronic scales with weights close to powder charges for checking maintained accuracy.