How to use the Triple Beam Balance

Like I have here. If that's not the case, you need to calibrate your machine using the weight back here or the knob on the side here. Ask your teacher for a specific instructions on how to use those. All right, so let's try taking the mass of something. I have here a bismuth geode, bismuth is a cool looking metal. It has all sorts of colors. And it makes these cool kind of shapes. This is actually an element on the periodic table. You can look it up there for more information. So I'm going to first place this on the metal plate here. That will cause the pointer over here to rise. And so our goal is to get that line on our pointer. 

Matched back up with this line next to our zero here. In order to do that, we have to move the weights over here. And we always want to start with the heaviest one. So I'm going to start with the hundreds, 'cause that's our biggest one. And it's important to note that with the hundreds and the tens, you don't see any lines in between the numbers like you do here on the ones place. So you have to choose a number to put that on. Because we just don't know the values in between numbers for sure. So 100 was not enough. But 200 is too much. So I'm going to move my slider back to 100. And I'm going to leave that one now. We're good on the hundreds place. We're all set, so we don't need to touch that anymore. Now I'll move on to tens. I'm going to move it about halfway first, just to see. 

That's far too much weight, so I'm going to move it back a little, 30 is still too much. And 20th is too much. Turn this to much just slightly too much. So we're actually going to leave this one at zero. And now I won't just move my ones place up front. Once you can put anywhere you want because there are lines in between numbers here. So I'm going to, since I know that it's close to ten, move it towards the end here. And the pointer is going to start moving. Once it starts moving, you want to just make slight adjustments until you found the correct mass. So I'm going to put it right about there and see if that works. Getting pretty close. Just a little under. 

So I'm going to move it back just a couple lines. And now we have it balanced. So the last step here is to add up the values on our three bars. I have 100 F zero, and I have 9 .5 because each of those lines is .1 grams. So all together, my geode here of bismuth weighs 109.5 grams. And that's how you find mass. All right, let me know if you have any questions. Otherwise, I will see you in the classroom.