counting-scales

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. A weighing-scales of the portable platform type, arranged for counting small hardware articles such as nuts, bolts, etc., by weight. It has two pans, a small one being suspended from the end of the balance-beam. One sample placed in this pan will balance one hundred placed on the platform. To count out a hundred nuts it is only necessary to place one nut in the pan and to place on the platform a quantity of the same nuts just sufficient to balance it. Small articles weighing less than a quarter of a pound can be counted by placing one in the small pan and more ill the larger pan: when the two pans balance there are twenty in the larger pan.