Team 4607 has been borrowing the scale from our wrestling club - and since I am no longer a Wrestling coach (Robotics got in the way), I do not feel that we should continue to use these scales.
What type of scale does your team use to weigh your robot and where did you purchase it from? I really like the scale that team 1816 uses…
We bought a postage scale from Office Depot. It has a (about) 1 foot square base and a cord that attaches between the base and the readout. We place a piece of wood on the scale, zero it out and then weigh the robot as the scale only goes up to around 130 lbs. It works for our purposes
Yup, this type of scale works really well for FRC. I used them on both back on 228 and now on 148. Here’s a link to this type of scale (I’m not sure if it was this exact brand, but it’s this same form factor):
BTW, do not let students/mentors weigh themselves on this, they are easy to break if you weigh over 150lbs.
We use two typical bathroom scales - have two students weigh themselves, pick up the bot and step on the scales together. Add the two weights together and subtract the students weights.
It can be very useful to have 4 scales, one for each corner of the robot. This allows you to determine how your center of gravity is located on the robot, which can affect how it drives and turns (especially if you ever use mecanum wheels).
The Simley pre-ship scrimmage always has a very nice 4-point scale at it - it might be worth contacting them to see where they got their scale.
Our science dept has a Vernier force plate and a Vernier Labquest. The force plate is the size of a bathroom scale. Typically we put a piece of plywood on scale zero out and weigh. I think it goes up to 250 lbs.
Somthing like this should be ideal with a peice of plywood. Accuracy is important so it might be worth investing in a scale that will last and be accurate.
A few guys on the team have a friend whose dad owns a veterinary clinic not too far from our school, so we go down there and weigh the robot on the scale for the large animals!
brought the bathroom scale to the shop, near the end of build. Tilted the robot up on it, read 76 lbs. At regional, added 4 lbs of lexan, got it weighed on the official scale, it was 80 lbs.
I bought several of the 400 lb postage scale from amazon listed above and gave them to teams throughout Michigan. I also checked against cal weights and they were within 0.1 lbs at 100 lbs.
We have a rather nice electronic package scale when we’re just interested in weight. When we want to find CoG, we pull out four spring “fish scales” and hang one corner of the robot from each of them. We even have some stands that were modified from turkey fryer hooks from which we can hang the spring scales.