Scales and Fixture

[boydlaf]

Hi everyone,

I am with Lafayette Motorsports. I am looking into upgrading to some high quality scales for accurately measuring each corner weight. I have heard some good things about Longacre's scales but I wanted to see if anyone had any suggestions about Longacre or a different product that has worked well. I also would like to purchase a setup fixture and platform for the car to sit on the scales. Our team has bought some bad cheap ones in the past, so we're looking for a bit higher quality-even if it's expensive. I'm open to any suggestions that anyone has about this.

Thank you,
Brendan

[bob.paasch]

The Longacre scales work fine. Build your own fixture for holding and leveling them, it's not that hard.

[DougMilliken]

... Build your own fixture for holding and leveling them, it's not that hard.
Before you build the fixture, run an error analysis to see the sensitivity to different variations from "perfectly level", document/correlate and bring it (either the rig, or photos) to design.

Edit -- Feb 25, 2015. Since the post above, I happened to meet a guy who sells scale pads. Have not seen them (so this is not a recommendation either way), just passing along the link -- www.trakkrats.com

[Charles Kaneb]

I needed scales for karting last season, so I went to Meijer, bought 6 identical cheap scales, unwrapped them all, found four that gave* my weight as the same number within 1#, and returned the other two. You'll want to find a good way to shim the scales to even out the best part of your floor.


*Zeroed to the same position, moved to the same position under load. They could be quadratic and have different quadratic curves for all I know!

[Charles Kaneb]

Addendum: Don't do the cheap-Meijer-scales trick.

The springs sag. I went from 165 to 180 lbs on real Toledo scales but 158 to 205 on the cheapo scales in the last year and a half. The kart mysteriously gained 25 lbs too and I'm not THAT much worse a fabricator or engineer than when I got to Detroit!