Making a simple balance from only basic Lego bricks

The other day, I was playing about with some of the simple bricks in the Lego Creationary set, and playing with a set of wheels and a plate set me thinking about how I would create a balance, or set of scales without using any Technic parts.

It is not perfect and could probably do with some refinements, but here is the basic idea. I used the wheels caught in two slopes to make a pivot, with a 2x2 round brick hanging from the pivot to allow it to balance. The beam should be below the pivot, otherwise the tendency for the beam to want to find equilibrium by tipping over will interfere.

The baskets in this case are a little too simple - just simple 4 x 4 hollow boxes. This has two problems - first it limits the size of the items, and also because the baskets tip with the beam being simply fastened, the  position of the contents will influence the balancing.

Also because the beam is caught in only a 2 wide gap, it can sometimes stick.

Oddly - I also found that while the Lego parts on each side were in theory identical (they may have come from different generations), when unladen, it still found equilibrium to slightly one side, so I hung a couple of 1x1 bricks from under one side to balance it back up.

I'm modelling a version of this in CAD with some of the problems remedied - the gap has been widened to 3 by using some 2x1 plates with one stud. A later revision I'll pop the baskets on stalks and caught in there own sliding chutes so larger baskets can be used, and item positioning no longer effects the balance.