Method
4 min
On weighing things
Every object leaves with its own measured mass printed on the card, not the batch average. Here is why that turned out to matter.
Stone is not consistent. Two discs cut from the same block, on the same day, on the same fixture, will differ by twenty or thirty grams, because the stone they came from had different amounts of air in it.
The industry answer is to print a nominal weight and add a tolerance. We weigh each one and print what it says. It costs about eleven seconds per object.
We started doing it as a quality check and kept doing it for a different reason. A batch average is a description of a factory. A weight is a description of a thing — that thing, the one in your hands, which is now slightly different from every other one we have made.
People write to us about this more than about anything else we do. Usually to say that they had not expected to care, and then did.