>Does anyone know how weigh stations work? I'd like to pull into
>one with my boat on the trailer and see how much it weighs. Is
>there a charge? Will the station allow me to drive on to the
>scales? I think I've read of people doing this, but would like
>to know before I go through the trouble.
What you need, I think, is not a weigh station - by which I suspect you
mean a state weigh station along a highway to monitor trucks' compliance
with weight and fee regulations - but rather "commercial scales". Check
your yellow pages. They're reasonably common (large truck stops, sand and
gravel wholesalers, etc.). It will probably cost you $10-15. Be sure they
know you want to weigh just the boat and trailer and not the entire rig, so
they have you stop with your vehicle off the scale but the trailer on. I
think, although the physics challenges me here, it's not going to be 100%
accurate in that it will be off by the amount of the weight transferred
from the tongue to your hitch - somewhere between 50 and 200
lbs. (Corrections welcome.) This might be enough to defeat your
purpose. There was an extensive discussion here not too long ago about
optimum hitch/tongue weights. The alternative would be to ask for a net
weight on the boat and trailer, which means weighing once with everything,
then driving out of the way and unhooking the boat and trailer, then
weighing just the tow vehicle.