Accuracy and Precision
These are the two concepts barely understood in this thread and misunderstood by most who attempted to explain their measurements.
^ the immediately-above response has to do with precision, not accuracy. Precision is how small a variation the scale will measure, and (if digital) will round to. For a bathroom scale, precision will vary. Mine is +/- 0.5 lbs, which is too coarse for bike measurements.
Accuracy is how close a measurement comes to the true weight. It's a measure of error, and it will vary depending on the scale mechanism and with absolute weight. Someone posted about 3% accuracy for body weight measurements. That seems high to me.
Either way, bathroom scales aren't meant for bicycles. Buy a decent luggage scale. Both accurate and precise enough (+/- 0.1 lb) for this type of work.
Last edited by Phil_gretz; 05-14-22 at 07:44 AM.
Reason: "Course" to "coarse", of course