Have you looked into financing the truck scale - lease to buy with a balloon payment at the end? Not sure about your local rules, but here we need NTEP certified scales to buy anything by weight. County comes out and has to certify it once a year. Our county does it for free but the catch is they only have the ability to certify up to a 2000 lb scale so a third part has to come out to certify it. We have 5000 lb floor scales in the warehouse (ohaus, bought them refurbished on their website for under $1,000!). I think we pay around 150 to 200 total to go through this annually. Now to certify the truck scales, i think it is well into the hundreds of dollars as they require special equipment to do it.... not to mention some time tieing it up.

My recommendation is to lease to finance the scale and open the scale to the public to "weigh" things... a friend of mine pulls in a couple hundred dollars cash a week doing this