Custom Load Cells Designed for Your Application

When a standard load cell will not fit, will not survive, or will not measure what you actually need to measure, Morehouse will design a custom load cell that does. Our engineering team draws on aerospace, civil, mechanical, and metrology backgrounds, and every custom load cell we deliver is engineered in-house, calibrated in-house, and certified to the same ISO/IEC 17025 accredited standards as our catalog products.

If you can describe the load path, the environment, the geometry, and the measurement you need, we can design a strain-gauge-based custom load cell to meet it.

A Track Record at Capacities Most Suppliers Will Not Quote

Morehouse has successfully designed and delivered custom load cell systems up to 6 000 000 lbf, and our calibrating machines can manufacture and calibrate compression load cell systems up to 10 000 000 lbf (we would calibrate a quantity of five 2 000 000 lbf custom load cells individually for this large of a capacity). At the other end of the range, we routinely build special application custom load cells in low capacities for tension testing, fixture instrumentation, and embedded measurement work.

Representative custom load cell builds include:

• A 5-to-1 safety-factor load cell for the nuclear industry
• A 6 000 000 lbf compression load cell system for oil and gas
• A tension load cell with custom ACME threads for a testing laboratory
• A wireless load cell with custom rod ends for a nuclear application
• A 1 000 000 lbf custom load cell built in-house at our York, PA facility, with an ASTM Class A verified range of forces down to approximately 2 % of full scale
• High-temperature gauging packages for elevated-service applications
• Larger active-gauge configurations to improve reproducibility on demanding measurement chains

We can turn around many capacities quickly, and we are equally comfortable quoting one specialty cell or a production run.

How Morehouse Builds a Custom Load Cell

Every custom load cell program follows the same engineering discipline:

1. Discovery and requirements. We start with your application, not a catalog. We ask about the load path, environment, capacity, geometry, interface hardware, indicator, and the decision the measurement needs to support.
2. Engineering and modeling. Morehouse engineers model the cell to your specifications — thread geometry, body length, connector orientation, bridge configuration, and material selection. STEP files and control drawings are provided for your review before any metal is cut.
3. Manufacturing. The cell is machined, heat-treated, gauged, wired, and sealed. Depending on the program, this happens entirely at our York, PA facility, or through one of the sourcing paths described below.
4. Calibration and uncertainty. Every custom load cell is calibrated by Morehouse on one of our six deadweight primary standards or our calibrating machines and delivered with an ISO/IEC 17025 accredited certificate, traceable to SI through NIST.
5. System verification. Where the application warrants it, we calibrate the full measurement chain — sensor, indicator, cables, adapters, and fixture — under conditions that replicate end use, so you receive one defensible uncertainty number for the system you actually deploy.

Where Your Custom Load Cell Is Built — and Why We Tell You

Morehouse takes transparency seriously, so we want you to know exactly how each custom load cell program is sourced. We work on three paths.

Path 1 — Built entirely in-house at Morehouse. The cell is designed, machined, heat-treated, gauged, sealed, and calibrated entirely at our York, PA facility. This is the default for prototypes, low quantities, unusual geometries, and any program where the customer has specifically requested fully domestic in-house manufacture.

Path 2 — Machining and heat treatment sourced; gauging, assembly, test, and calibration performed in-house. For many custom load cell programs, Morehouse engineers the cell, releases the drawings, and has the body machined and heat-treated by a qualified partner. The finished blank is then returned to our facility, where Morehouse technicians perform 100 % of the strain gauging, bonding, wiring, environmental sealing, electrical and mechanical test, and final calibration. This is a deliberate sourcing choice, it lets us scale custom load cell capacity without compromising the operations that actually determine measurement quality. The gauging, the bonding, the bridge, the seal, and the calibration all stay with Morehouse, because that is where load cell quality is made.

Path 3 — Larger quantity orders built through a vetted supply partner, finished and certified by Morehouse. For larger production runs, or when in-house capacity is committed, Morehouse may produce the cell body and selected components through a long-standing qualified supplier. In every such case, the design is Morehouse engineering, incoming components are inspected to Morehouse requirements, final assembly and verification are controlled by Morehouse, and every cell is calibrated in our ISO/IEC 17025 accredited laboratory and ships with a Morehouse calibration certificate.

If you require a fully in-house manufacture, tell us at the quote. Some customers — defense primes, nuclear suppliers, ITAR-sensitive programs, Buy American programs, or customers who simply prefer it — need every operation performed at our York, PA facility. We will quote that explicitly, schedule it against in-house capacity. Lead time and price may differ from Path 2 or Path 3, and we would rather have that conversation up front than surprise you later.

In every scenario, the engineering and calibration ownership remain with Morehouse. Those are the parts of the work that determine whether your measurement is defensible in service, and those are the parts we never let out the door.

Industries We Build Custom Load Cells For

Aerospace and defense, rocket propulsion and test stands, oil and gas, nuclear, energy and renewables, airlines and MRO, construction and civil engineering, manufacturing, healthcare, test and measurement laboratories, and asphalt and soil testing.

Start the Conversation

If you have an application that a standard load cell cannot serve, we want to hear about it. Call (717) 843-0081 or email sales@mhforce.com to begin a custom load cell discussion.