You need to weigh the water. Everything acquired is paper

Consider you you need to measure the mass of some water and for that you want to build a scale. You are in a normal house full of normal things. There is no elegant scientific equipment. Can you do it with an ordinary household object?

I think that’s possible, and I’ll try to do that, with a paper.

Okay, but why? I started with my job as a technical advisor for the CBS session MacGyver. My job was to check the credibility of the different hacks and sometimes suggest ways that MacGyver could get out of a difficult situation. One of MacGyver’s favorite was a paper clip; so I thought I would see how many things I could do with it.

So far, I’ve made a few gadgets based on paper clips.

It’s fun to make complicated objects out of the basic parts, it’s the MacGyver way.

Now for the scale. That sounds simple, but there will be some graphics to make it more appropriate as a blog post instead of a video. Let’s do it.

Remember, the purpose here is to measure the mass of some water. Since we are on the surface of the earth, there is a constant relationship between mass and weight; so we’re going to measure the weight of the water technically. What is the difference between mass and weight? Here is my full explanation, but the short answer is that mass is the amount of matter that makes up a thing (protons, neutrons, electrons) and weight is the force of gravity that the Earth exerts on that object.

So how do you measure weight? It turns out that most of our measuring instruments are actually for measuring distance. (It’s true-look.) In this case, we can determine the weight (and therefore mass) of something by measuring the deviation of a paper clip or how much it bends. If you point a paper clip at a long wire, the more ends you push, the more it will bend. However, when the paper clip shape is normally wrapped, it is much harder to fold. It is very similar to the force required to stretch the spring, it is much more difficult to deform than a straight thread. However, to achieve the perfect spring, the spacing distance is linearly proportional to the elongation force, which may not be true with a paper clip.

So the idea is that if we close the paper, we can turn the lever arm that will help us weigh the water.

Let’s build this thing. Here’s what I have.