Research Chemicals: Measuring Doses Accurately (Question)

I've got a good deal of research chemicals coming pretty soon. What I don't have is an accurate scale capable of weighing out such small doses (0.001g+). I certainly do not want to spend hundreds of dollars on such a scale nor do I want to spend $40-60 on a cheaper one that may be misleading.


When dosing your research chemicals, do you simply eyeball the substances or use a means of measuring it out? If you measure it out, how do you do it? What equipment are you using? Also, once measured how do you-personally-ingest the dose?

EDIT: Perhaps I should clear this up. This time the chemical is a crystalline powder and I am receiving 1000mg in one packet. That is my only reference, the 1000mg packet.

KiefCatcher said:

I've got a good deal of research chemicals coming pretty soon. What I don't have is an accurate scale capable of weighing out such small doses (0.001g+). I certainly do not want to spend hundreds of dollars on such a scale nor do I want to spend $40-60 on a cheaper one that may be misleading.


When dosing your research chemicals, do you simply eyeball the substances or use a means of measuring it out? If you measure it out, how do you do it? What equipment are you using? Also, once measured how do you-personally-ingest the dose?

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50mg substance + 25ml solvent = 2mg/ml.

what rc are you taking that the dosages are in the thousands of a gram?? i can't think of one that you need to get that small of a dose for, but maybe i'm wrong, but i really don't think so, fuck, that's like the size of a piece of dust ...
i got a cheap mg scale that works fine for my needs.. also, if you know what amount of a said substance you're getting, you can simply keep halving it down in size till you get to a suitable dose size.. say you have 100mg, half that, than you have 2 50 mg piles in front of you.. half one of the 50 piles again, 2 25 mg piles.. simply do this till you reach the size dose that you want.. not the best way to be doing things, but it will work fairly well if you don't have a scale..

I don't need to weigh out .001gr of substance, I am simply saying that the scales claim to be accurate to .001gr.

I use one of these. It's cheap and may be off by a milligram or two but it hasn't driven me into insanity with its calibrations yet . Only other real option I see is to do what shmow52 suggested and dissolve the substance into measured liquid.

Swag said:

I use one of these. It's cheap and may be off by a milligram or two but it hasn't driven me into insanity with its calibrations yet . Only other real option I see is to do what shmow52 suggested and dissolve the substance into measured liquid.

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That's the very scale I was considering. Haha it is definitely in my price range. I would dissolve it, but that would leave me with 2 cups of solution 2mg/mL. That's a lot of liquid. I will probably end up dumping out all of the powder, evening it all out flat and in a large block, halving, halving, halving, halving, halving, and halving some more. Unless I cave on a scale. Or someone mentions a more ideal method.

Just buy a scale dude. My first one, I spent ~$100 on. It broke after only a few months. I replaced it with a ~$30 or so one like the Gemeni...I believe mine is American Weigh, but anyways it works fine.

To weigh anything under 25 mg, you must increase the weight on the balance as it isn't very accurate at such small amounts (Like 10-15mg will often not even register and it will read 0.000).

Put a calibration weight on the balance in addition to the chems your weighing though and everything registers just fine.

heir proctor said:

Just buy a scale dude. My first one, I spent ~$100 on. It broke after only a few months. I replaced it with a ~$30 or so one like the Gemeni...I believe mine is American Weigh, but anyways it works fine.

To weigh anything under 25 mg, you must increase the weight on the balance as it isn't very accurate at such small amounts (Like 10-15mg will often not even register and it will read 0.000).


Put a calibration weight on the balance in addition to the chems your weighing though and everything registers just fine.

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That's a good idea! I've had the same problem with my gemini, but never thought to do that!

Since my more expensive scale broke I have been weighing most things on a blank folded-business card. Adds less than a gram to the whole weight(mine has a 10g max), and seems to allow for the accuracy I desire.

KiefCatcher said:

That's the very scale I was considering. Haha it is definitely in my price range. I would dissolve it, but that would leave me with 2 cups of solution 2mg/mL. That's a lot of liquid. I will probably end up dumping out all of the powder, evening it all out flat and in a large block, halving, halving, halving, halving, halving, and halving some more. Unless I cave on a scale. Or someone mentions a more ideal method.

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Yeah thats what I do at the moment, just half the piles till you have the amount of MGs you want, quicker and easier than using scales in my opinion, and your not going to be far off at all really

Ellis Dee said:

Since my more expensive scale broke I have been weighing most things on a blank folded-business card. Adds less than a gram to the whole weight(mine has a 10g max), and seems to allow for the accuracy I desire.

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This is actually a better way, as the balance can get a bit crowded with a calibration weight and a weighing tray.

You will find the cheaper electronic milligram scale to be suprisingly accurate. I have reasons to use minute quatities in my micropropagation experiments and was forced to check my cheapo (50 bucks) milligram scale against certified weights sent to me by labs. I can honestly say that if you are careful you can get to within 5 mg of your goal. I can not imagine anyone anywhere simply eyballing a dose of any RC and simply presuming that the gram you bought from the company was exactly 1,000 milligrams. That, in my opinion is foolish in the extreme with chemicals active in the tens of milligrams.

Weigh the whole thing on the 0.01g balance, then dissolve it in a known volume of solvent. It's the easiest way.

If you want to save money just keep an eye out for used lab equipment. They have to spend the money they get to keep their budget from being decreased so they will often sell off old equipment cheap. Ebay, LabX, and Sci-Bay are good sites to look though there are many others.

Also don't forget that you have to calibrate your digital scale as soon as you get it installed to adjust for the local gravitational force. Any calibration preformed offsite cannot be considered accurate for a scale that measure gravitational force instead of mass.

I use same method as ellis, using the american weigh gemini that goes up to 20g, mines acurate with in 3mg..