i run 420lbs on my mystere 5.5

how do you calibrate a Loose gauge? I've got the old style (you hook up and pull outward)

Hang known weight from a cable and measure the tension.

LOOS. Not Loose- what are you an American voter?

Loos guages in the box come with a calibration page for each wire diameter.
Conversion of Loos numbers to pounds of Kg change with the wire thickness and type. This Wire thickness can be measured by numerous means: V-groove guage, micrometer, slide guage, calibrated eyeball. You can probably get someone to xerox this page for you.

Whew...that was rough. Loos gauges, the one's we typically purchase, are not terribly accurate devices. To calibrate one you need to actually test it with a known condition.

[quoteHang known weight from a cable and measure the tension. [/quote]

I am going to comment before somebody starts tying some old wire to a tree limb and hanging their dumbbells from the other end to calibrate their Loos gauge.

There is a procedure for calibrating deflection gauges and just hanging weights will not work.

At a minimum both ends of the test wire must be constrained like they are on what you are measuring and there are minimum wire lenghts.

I would not calibrate a Loos gauge unless I was calibrating it against the actual wire in the actual configuration. What Loos gauges actually measure deflection. How this relates to tension depends on a lot of things (alloy, hardness, style, # of strands, age etc). There is a lot of conservatism built into those charts Loos provides and you could get into a lot of trouble if your test was optimistic.

If you buy a calibrated load cell, stick it in line with your rigging, and then load it up and see what the Loos gauge shows, GREAT. However just hanging a weight from the end of a wire, might not work so well.

Since this LTHector seems to have everything else to offer, I wonder if he has some kind of Loos gauge calibration wheel...

Just asking.