Steve's Things

Trying to make sense of the standard stormer viscometer and methods that could be used to calibrate a device, I’ve been looking at the original stormer viscometer in order to get an idea of what ‘grams’ actually means in the case of the stormer viscometer. Here are some facts.

The weight in grams is held on a pulley and pulls on a rotating pulley that is 1.125″ in diameter. That pulley rotates some gears or belts at a ratio of 11:1 (1 rotation of the pulley = 11 rotations of the spindle). Taking the torque applied on the main pulley and dividing it by 11 results in the actual torque to the spindle.

Simply because I use it in these cases, here is the conversion ratio for grams hung on the instrument to oz-inches. Also, one should keep in mind that there is some loss of torque due to mechanical limitations.

oz-inches == .00367056 * grams

therefore, using this formula, a KU meter ranging from 32 grams to 1099 grams ranges from .1174 oz-in to 4.0339 oz-in.

yay! Hopefully someone finds this useful as well. 🙂