Re: Weigh Station?
Bill Combs (ttursine@earthlink.net)
Thu, 04 Nov 1999 10:34:14 -0600
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West Wight Potter Website at URL
http://www.lesbois.com/wwpotter/
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> West Wight Potter Website at URL
> http://www.lesbois.com/wwpotter/
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> At 02:22 AM 11/04/1999 -0800, you wrote:
>
>>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.
>
Your best bet is probably Moving & Storage outfits, often also listed under
Commercial Scales. Around here (small town America) the cost is $5. If you
don't want a certified weight (for which you receive a piece of paper),
they will often give you the second weigh-in for free; smile and make nice
w/ the guy running the scale.
Weigh the whole rig and then either the tow vehicle or the trailer
(whichever weighs the most) alone. Subtract/add to get the third weight.
[Most of these scales are designed for _big_ rigs, so we lightweights
should get measurements on the heaviest components we have, to make the
percentage error as small as possible.]
Keep the rig as close to the center of the scale as you can; edge effects
do occur. If, however, they don't want to wait for you to couple/uncouple,
a weight taken with the wheels of the unmeasured component (trailer or tow
vehicle) just off the edge of the scale is better than nothing. You can
later estimate or use a bathroom scale to get tongue weight and adjust your
results thereby.
Regards,
Bill Combs
WWP 19 #439 (Aug 1987)
"Ursa Minor"
Fort Walton Beach FL
ttursine@earthlink.net