I bought this T-Mech Industrial Beam Scales to make a cattle weighing scales using an old Nugent portable cattle crush.
The old crush was in poor condition and the original floor had rotted away completely.
I consulted my fabricator friend Robert about folding up a new floor for the crush and he kindly offered to do the entire build. At this rate I may need to rename the blog Fabricator-Robs-Shed.
He cut out the worst of the rot with a cheap Parkside plasma cutter from Lidl. I must keep an eye out for the next time they are in store as its proven to be a handy little tool.
He welded in the new floor,
And added some reinforcement.
Finally some channels have been added to the bottom to hold the weigh beams.
There is still a little bit of tidying up to be done, but hopefully be finished shortly. I’ll update this page with the finished product. As always there are more pictures on my Flickr https://flic.kr/s/aHsmQtpxRE
Update 26/09/2020
Tried out the scales for the first time today and it works perfectly.
The only issue is my yard in front of the crush is a little uneven so I had to level the weigh beams using some paving slabs.
Some notes on the Beam Scales
On the first day I received the scales I decided to investigate some of the menus and some how I messed up the calibration by a factor of 2. Luckily I was picking up some bulk bags from 2 different suppliers so I asked them to give me the exact weights, I recalibrated the scales with one bag and compared the weight of the second, so I know the scales is calibrated at least as well as that of 2 local businesses. There is a set of jumper pins inside the unit to enable and disable calibration so I’d recommend setting this to disable.
There is a serial port hidden inside the unit which may be useful for future automation of weighing especially if/when EID tags become mandatory.
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