| The Breakroom > The Water Cooler |
| *lmao* Imperial system.. ;) |
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| Pete.:
--- Quote from: doubleboost on November 29, 2013, 04:02:51 PM ---I was brought up with feet and inches Having fractions and uneven numbers made you think harder Even the money 12 pennys to a shilling made you think I still work in imperial most of the time I well remember asking a young lad to cut 3/8 off the end of something (he thought I was taking the piss) John --- End quote --- John - last year I met a newly-qualified site engineer who asked for a 200mm hole to be drilled in concrete. Now diamond core bits are mostly made with imperial tubes so we still often refer to the hole sizes in inches. I said "Just the one eight inch hole - nothing else?", and the guy looked puzzled. The site manager burst out laughing and said to the young engineer "See I told you that you were weird", then to me he said "He doesn't know what eight inches is". I looked the engineer up and down and said "No, I don't suppose he does" The site manager roared with laughter again... |
| NeoTech:
*sits in my corner snickering* that escalated quickly. Its like the old Mac vs. PC discusson. ;) Every system of measuring has its faults. I mostly use fractions myself. Like 1 n 2/3 of a given distance.. :) Thanks anyway for a entertaining thread. :) |
| Anzaniste:
It's much easier to divide by eye something into half and thus a quater, an eighth, sixteenth etc than it is to divide things by tents. |
| philf:
Just to add my tuppence worth...... OK you can easily divide 7/8" by 2 to get 7/16" quite easily. This gets more complicated when you get to measurements like 3 17/32" (Half of which is 1 49/64" I think). Now what happens when you want to move that distance on your lathe or mill? You have to turn the fractional measurement into a decimal number to do anything with it! The decimal system wins! :D (I'm sure someone, somewhere will have a lathe or mill with fractional divisions to contradict me!) :beer: Phil. |
| Pete W.:
Hi there, all, From where I'm looking, both Imperial and Metric systems are established enough that neither can be denied. So, I have enough measurement equipment to do the jobs I do in whichever system is the more appropriate. What I do find bizarre, though, is when someone tries to specify something in one system that was conceived, designed and manufactured in the other. For instance, an eBay seller describing chunks of 3/8" tool steel as 9.5 mm (and often measuring it so coarsely that whether it's an Imperial or a Metric item is obscured!). To quote another example - one of my hobbies is microscopy and it's regrettably common to encounter a 'definition' of the Royal Microscopical Society thread for microscope objectives expressed in millimetres, it just looks daft! I'll concede that if you were screw-cutting that thread on a lathe with a Metric lead-screw, you'd need to have two toes of one foot standing in Metric territory but every parameter of that thread is fundamentally conceived and specified in Imperial units and I can't be comfortable with its being expressed any other way. The most bizarre case I ever encountered was when the Technical Publications department of a certain company, off their own bat and without consulting the Engineering department, 'metricated' the handbooks for an electronic system that had been designed in Imperial units. The text contained gems like 'carefully remove the 15.875 mm cap-head bolts ... ' I didn't know whether to laugh or cry - the blighters charged the whole fiasco to my budget! :bang: :bang: :bang: |
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