Thread: Imperial Metric Confusions

I know that Bunnies dowel is also a PITA...... (I agree with Hermit)
Their Pine dowel is labelled 6mm and is, and their tassie oak labelled 6mm is actually 1/4 inch...
PITA for sure...........

Cheers

Geoff

Hi all.
Well I'm an oldie, & at times, I get confused with the Metric, especially when they use CM. Like you younger people, you have virtually grown up with metric, & then you have trouble with Imperial.

Remember most of the older tools were made in Imperial, & I get a laugh when they try to convert it to Metric. Wont work.

The hardest one I find is when they tell you a Person's Height.

I think you will find now the the Real Estate People are going back to Acres, as they are having trouble will the older generation, as in trying to sell them some Land in Hectares, & they just can't work it out.

If I stick with MM. then I'm OK, but if I get it in CM then I'm up S%^&*t creek.

Obviously, they shouldn't have brought in the metric system until all the old people died.

Originally Posted by AlexS

Obviously, they shouldn't have brought in the metric system until all the old people died.

Funny bugger!!!

It was funny that they made imperial illegal for several years after metric started.
I remember one guy imported wooden rulers, one side metric and one side imperial.

They were marked as an illegal import seeing it had imperial on it.
He argued that it had metric on the other side, but customs were having none of it.

He said he'd donate them to the education department and they could give them to school kids.

Nope, Its an illegal import and not allowed into the country.
Think it was 10 years after metric system started here that they removed the ruling.

What is stupid here is house plans are marked in mm.
Europe will mark them in Metres, 2.7 metres is not hard to measure is it, But here it needs to be marked as 2700mm.

Ah well

Originally Posted by elanjacobs

Part of the problem is that the imperial system is still in common use, especially in the plumbing/gas fitting world, to the point that in some industries it is still the standard unit or a close second for backward compatibility.

Are you suggesting that the plumbing and gas fitting worlds in places like Japan, China, France, Germany, continental Europe work in the imperial system??

90% of the world is metric, and it seems silly that we have become stuck in a half-way state.




Fair Winds

Graeme

Quite so. Think metric, it's a dozen times easier.

Originally Posted by GraemeCook

Are you suggesting that the plumbing and gas fitting worlds in places like Japan, China, France, Germany, continental Europe work in the imperial system??

90% of the world is metric, and it seems silly that we have become stuck in a half-way state.




Fair Winds

Graeme

The thread is about the problem here, that's what I was commenting on

Metric was meant to be an easier simpler system, though in the RAN in the 1970's & 80's all the ships engineering was imperial.
It then became more confusing with all the different thread types & pitches....
From memory you've got; BA, BF, BSP, NPT, UNF, UNC, BSF, BSC, Whitworth, Metric course, metric fine, metric super fine, and the list goes on and on....
plus not mentioning the grade & type of material used.....
I've found that working with plans; if the book is written in imperial use imperial and if metric use metric,
but on the whole I love ''mm'' for measuring so much easier than 1/16'' etc, etc.....
Though that's only my poor knocked about brain....
Cheers, crowie

Originally Posted by crowie

but on the whole I love ''mm'' for measuring so much easier than 1/16'' etc, etc.....

And once you get to 64ths you might as well just give up.
I do like how they're also doing decimal inches just to give you another thing to figure out.

Originally Posted by elanjacobs

And once you get to 64ths you might as well just give up.

I pretty well did give up when it came to dealing with "thou" in the machine-shop .............

The RAN was imperial because the ships were American. All the Anzacs etc are metric except for a few American systems on board. CWIS being the main one.

Originally Posted by elanjacobs

The thread is about the problem here, that's what I was commenting on

But elsewhere is part of the problem here.

While the might of the US economy may be waning and its manufacturing is one the path to being moribund, the
situation remains that they have massive influence over so many things, including measurements. After seeing the
mess Australia made of metric they simply said " not for us".

As I pointed out earlier, even supposedly metric countries haven't got their act together. The extent of manafacturing
in Latin America, particularly Brasil and Argentina is large and growing. Much of their early infrastructure and
manufacturing was done by the Brits, and what system did they use....? now these places have a hotch potch of
metric and imperial.

The rise of India as an economic and industrial power will also ensure the continuance of a duel system from which we
simply cannot isolate ourselves.

When I first started work, we used to measure river heights in feet and decimals of a foot (e.g. 3.02') at some stations where there was a recording instrument, and feet, inches and fractions of an inch (e.g. 3' 1 1/8") where there was just a gauge reader. Recon that didn't cause some confusion.

When Australia was about to go metric in 1974 I made a conversion chart for work just before I left, covering all the units that we were likely to use, and distributed copies to everyone in our unit. It was so useful that everyone made copies and it became widely used throughout the organisation. Only problem was, it had a mistake.
Shortly afterwards, I moved on. When I returned 10 years later, there were still copies of it stuck up on peoples' cupboards, and even when I retired 30 years after the original chart was made, it was still being used, often with the original error uncorrected!