Thread: What is 4 3/8 inch in real measurements?

Originally Posted by elanjacobs

The inch was internationally standardised in July 1959 as 25.4mm exactly

I will lose sleep over the difference of about 762 Angstrom units per milimeter.

Originally Posted by rrich

BTW - It was the Shelias of America that stopped the great American conversion to metric with these 5 words, "I won't cook in metric".

I had my doubts on this, and having never looked it up, I decided to (because it seemed strange to me that the USA had never converted). Here's an article giving some background to the lack of conversion: Why Won’t America Go Metric? | Time

Note - I do call into question the authors comment that Jefferson refused metric because the metre had been measured as a portion of a survey of France - the metre is actually defined at 1/10,000,000th the distance from the equator to the North Pole as far as I know.

Still, interesting to hear some reasons why they never switched across

Originally Posted by joe greiner

Feet and hundredths, actually.

Joe

You've been there!

Originally Posted by Midnight Man

the metre is actually defined at 1/10,000,000th the distance from the equator to the North Pole as far as I know.

It was originally defined that way in 1793. It was later defined by various metal bars, the number of wavelengths of a particular radiation emission of Krypton-86 and, finally, in 1983, by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299792458 seconds.

Lol Elan, I was about to question you about light travelling 1 meter in a vacuum and taking an entire second. I can run faster than that, luckily I saw the edit

Midnight Man,
Yeah but a neighbor, his wife and my wife were all discussing the merits of the metric system when the comment came up. Neither I nor the neighbor could convince our wives of the value or the metric system. My father in law was a machinist and really wanted to go metric but the MIL was more obstinate than one can imagine. My mother, a chemistry major, expressed it as "pfft".

I think that two steps are necessary for metric to be a success in the US. First, all recipes need to be converted to use metric VOLUMETRIC measurements. Second, vehicle economy numbers need to be OFFICIALLY specified as liters per 100 Kilometers. Until that half of the population is in agreement nothing is going to happen.

I told SWMBO that I had to go out and buy an Imperial Hammer.....I have a metric one but it doesn't drive 2" nails into a piece of 4x2.

Would have been OK if I had 50mm nails and some timber of 100 mm x 50mm dimensions. I could have milled it down but I don't have an imperial planer & thicknesser.


Oh well...off to the tool shop AGAIN.

So how long is a miner's inch?

Originally Posted by ian

It's 3 tenths of a foot (measured in Decimal feet). Nothing strange about it at all. Up till about 1973/74 decimal feet were the standard survey measurement system in Australia.

I have vague recollections of using feet & inches on cadastral plans, but I may be wrong there.
Decimal feet were certainly used on river gauge boards pre-1974, but we also had feet & inches boards, for the gauge readers who couldn't understand the decimals.

In advance of the conversion to metric, I did a large table with all the units we were likely to use in our organisation. After it was widely distributed, I discovered an error, so had to issue a correction.

I moved on shortly afterwards, and when I returned to the organisation more than 10 years later, there were still copies of the erroneous table being used.

Originally Posted by AlexS

So how long is a miner's inch?

...but it measures flow not distance...

Originally Posted by rrich

Midnight Man,
Yeah but a neighbor, his wife and my wife were all discussing the merits of the metric system when the comment came up. Neither I nor the neighbor could convince our wives of the value or the metric system. My father in law was a machinist and really wanted to go metric but the MIL was more obstinate than one can imagine. My mother, a chemistry major, expressed it as "pfft".

The two chemistry labs I worked in in the US both operated entirely in metric and when our lab did collaborative work with the USGS in Denver and Virginia everything was metric.

doug3030 wanted pics......

Imp HAmmer.PNG
Imperial Hammer.......8oz



Met Hammer.PNG
Metric Hammer.......425g



Imp Met Hammer.PNG
New improved Imperial/Metric Combo Hammer.......560g/20oz

Geez - those metric hammers are dear

They reduced the price of the imperials......old stock