*lmao* Imperial system.. ;)

The Breakroom > The Water Cooler

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geoff_p:
When I worked in Taiwan, I bought a steel rule - it was marked out to 305mm on one edge and TEN 'U-flung-whatsits' on the other, so 1 'U-flung-whatsit' was equal to 30.5mm or 1.2 inches. Nobody could tell me what was the purpose.

I used to buy a couple of kilos of meat at the market, but checking it before cooking it was way under weight - the stall-holder explained to me they have two versions of Kilogram, the Market Kilo and the international one.

Lew_Merrick_PE:
My original trade training was making guitars & lutes. The guitar industry in America actually came from the German States at the start of the 19th century and was intrinsically metric. Thus, I learned the metric system long before most Americans. My next apprenticeship was as a tool & die machinist in what was at that time the center of pulp & paper that is based on 1/256ths of an inch. I moved into canning about the time that that industry changed to decimal inches. This made me tri-lingual when it came to measurements.

I keep hoping that the metric system will get its act together. In my lifetime, the basic definition of the metre has changed twice and the temperature scale changed from Centigrade to Celsius to account for errors in the placement of 0°C. Then there are metric screwthreads that took from 1947 to 1999 to standardize such that major-diameter & pitch definitions were consistent. I discovered this little disparity while installing radomes for NATO in 1972-73. American (supposedly) ISO metric threads were not the same as DIN metric threads which were different from both British Standard and French ISO metric threads. As I was being paid by the hour for this work, it was an interestingly profitable situation.

Here we are in 2013 (almost 2014) and the default tolerance & allowance on metric screwthreads still comes in: US-ISO, BS, DIN, French ISO, and JIC variations. If I have a default male DIN thread mating to a default JIC female thread, there is a 42% chance that the two will not correctly assemble. This example is from a 2009 analysis I did for Microsoft when they needed to apportion blame (fix the blame and then fix the problem, right?) on a production "mishap." Thus, in multi-national manufacturing operations, every (metric) screwthread must include a non-default tolerance & allowance condition set -- which is then priced (costed) as a special thread -- if one is to actually guarantee 100% fit-up at assembly.

Yeah, tell me about it...

ieezitin:
Geeees Lew.. Relating to your example on international standards, Let me enlighten you…… Its all done by design.

I designed and manufactured crimping machines for electrical leaved cores for coils for a supplier in Wales back in the eighties, I made up my own thread sizes and often reversed them, just because I wanted it harder for them or whomever to reverse engineer them alas eliminating me as a supplier, I still use this practice today.

It’s funny how a timing belt snaps at 100,000 miles on a VW Diesel engine. It’s funny why Gm, Ford and Chrysler use both thread systems on there vehicles, not forgetting every bloody torx ,slothead, Phillips, hex, 12 point, 6 point bla bla for fasteners.

Shuffling forward, imperial or Metric, it’s all maths, the power comes from going deeper past the decimal point.

Anthony.

doubleboost:
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

tom osselton:

--- Quote from: 75Plus on November 29, 2013, 10:34:35 AM ---Using the Imperial system America has put men on the moon and returned them safely 6 times. Haven't heard of any moon landings using the metric system.

I might also point out that during WWI and WWII the winners were on the Imperial system while the losers were on metrics.

This is a subject that should be closed before it escalates!!

Joe

--- End quote ---
Well they did land on mar's or at least several feet below it! It seem that by farming out the jobs metric and imperial was used in the software :zap: I belive. I was taught the Imperial way and can't really find a fault with it but they did switch to metric when I graduated :bang: folowing the american's who aperantly switched back to imperial from what I heard was a cost of changing over to it. Canada stayed in to stay in step with the rest of the world, and as far as the other measurements there are specific to that area of industry.
So the last thing I have to say is :
Everyone is out of step but our Tommy! :ddb:

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