Hey - swim should get a scale soon but he was thinking this may be a good plan.
Swim was wondering if aluminium foil could be used - as in : 1 square mm = 1mg so a 5cm squared piece weighs 50mg

that is not the actual weight of foil but swim thought that may be a good way to work weight out then a balance beam could be used to weigh ur spice against the foil.

Can anyone here weigh a piece of foil to see how many mm's = 1 mg ?
It would stop swim from flipping pushing the boundaries when he intends to just sniff the outskirts of hyperspace.

Not sure what you're trying to do here; Any decent balance should have some zeroing function, so just put the foil (or any weighting board you are going to use) and zero the balance with it before weighting anything.

And your calculation is wrong; if 1mm square is assumed to weight 1 mg, then a 50mm square (or 5cm square) should have a surface of 50 x 50 = 2500 mm2 and should assumed to weight 2500mg, not 50mg.

If on the other hand you are looking to calibrate your balance, balances usually comes with calibration weights. If not, then coins can be used as calibration weights. The UK penny coin weights exactly 1/8 of an ounce, that is around 3.4grams. similar information can be found for coins of other countries I would presume.

yeah sorry perhaps i wasnt clear enough - by balance i mean a home made balance - just a stick with 2 plates on strings below it - obviously the balance is made as lightweight as possible - this tek has been used by various dream swims to weigh out mushies against coin weights with great success.
and sorry yeah by 50 mm i was thinking of 50 1mm pieces.

so anyone weigh out 50mg of foil and record its size ?

Maybe someone can post a pic of 50mg of spice next to a coin or something for scale.

that would be much appreciated but rather something else other than a coin unless its south african currency or a 2 euro coin

That's funny, I tried to make a milligram scale myself but it's too clumsy to be practical. The weights I made from aluminium foil are probably pretty accurate though. I used a digital scale with 0.01 g accuracy to weigh a large piece of foil and cut that in suitable parts.

Conclusion: 10 mg of foil is 3.4 square cm. One square mm would be only 0.03 mg!
Actually, 50 mg is quite a lot

But the foil sold in your area might be different!

Yes some brands in other countries and even subsets of those brands are different thicknesses.

not to mention that weight varies depending on purity...

don't worry about the amount! put enough on so that you can vaporize until you vaporize!