I put together a spreadsheet to help me calculate drop weights for Ranger’s weight pulls. At first it was designed for dogs in his rough weight range and for a specific set of equipment. Upon further thought I decided to make it go from a 1-block drop on up to a 25-block drop and to work on any vehicle. It calculates from an empty cart on up to the 16th drop (I don’t know how many dogs are pulling that number of times in a day).
To use, enter the weight of the block (or bags or iron bars, but for simplicity’s sake let’s stick with “block”, the weight of the equipment, and the weight of the dog.
The sheet will calculate the amount of weight the dog needs to pull for UKC points. It will give the weight needed for a qualifying score, as well as 5, 10, 15, or 20 point pulls as defined by the current champion point system. These are also the percentages for All Star points (minus the Q counts only for the UWP title and Total Dog, but not for the All Stars or for Champion points). It will calculate the weight of each individual drop, as well as the cumulative weight of the blocks on the vehicle.
Once you know the weight your dog needs to pull for points you can better decide how to vote when deciding on blocks-per-drop and which drops you need to pass on to save energy. This will also allow you to better dial in your dog when starting (this is probably more important for new pullers than for seasoned veterans).
If you want only the number of blocks on the vehicle during each drop, enter “0” for the weight of the vehicle, and “1” for the weight of the block. This is especially helpful if you’re going for the closest weight needed for your dog to make his or her points pulls.
The sheet does not designate pounds or kilograms.
I attached the file to this post in two different formats. It’s available in Open Office format (.odt) or in Microsoft Excel (.xls).
If you have any questions (I’m typing this up as I’m very tired), please leave them in the comments below and I’ll address them. If you have trouble downloading, please let me know that as well.
I’m told it will work on smartphones and the like, however I have not tested this myself as I don’t currently have such a device. That said, I know the columns may need a little tweaking by you for your device. It does work well in google docs (which is where I did much of the editing, so you may notice that none of the cells are locked).
As always, the information provided here is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. That means, share it so long as you don’t sell it and you give credit where credit is due. If it needs correction (as I found a bad cell after three days of tweaking), please let me know. If you have improvements or suggestions, let me know that as well.
Weight Spreadsheet–narrow (MS Excel)
Weight Spreadsheet–narrow (Open Office)