Meandering through the Measurements..

[Mictheslik]

I volunteer for a charity that restores British aeroplanes from the 60s and 70s during my free time and often have to fabricate components alongside older members. It does amuse me when they ask me to drill a hole 3 5/8 inches from the edge etc.

I'm gradually winning them over to the brilliance of a decimal system where all the measurements (in mm!) are nice numbers and not horrible fractions

To be honest, the conversions are not hard to remember, just hard to implement when trying to work out eighths.....and on that point, why when measuring do you say 4/8 and not 1/2?

.mic

[Fozzer]

I volunteer for a charity that restores British aeroplanes from the 60s and 70s during my free time and often have to fabricate components alongside older members. It does amuse me when they ask me to drill a hole 3 5/8 inches from the edge etc.

I'm gradually winning them over to the brilliance of a decimal system where all the measurements (in mm!) are nice numbers and not horrible fractions

To be honest, the conversions are not hard to remember, just hard to implement when trying to work out eighths.....and on that point, why when measuring do you say 4/8 and not 1/2?

.mic

You wont win, until all we; "Oldies" are dead, Mic... ... ...!

(..and all our Road Signs are in Kilometres)... ...!

Paul....3 and 5/16th's of an Inch..... ...!

32/64th's is also 1/2... ...!

[Hagar]

I volunteer for a charity that restores British aeroplanes from the 60s and 70s during my free time and often have to fabricate components alongside older members. It does amuse me when they ask me to drill a hole 3 5/8 inches from the edge etc.

I'm gradually winning them over to the brilliance of a decimal system where all the measurements (in mm!) are nice numbers and not horrible fractions

To be honest, the conversions are not hard to remember, just hard to implement when trying to work out eighths.....and on that point, why when measuring do you say 4/8 and not 1/2?

.mic

In my experience it's easy to make mistakes when converting between different units of measurement. It's best to work in the units on the drawing or manual you're working from. Imperial measurements were used on the older British aircraft you're working on so it would make sense for you to learn them.

As a general rule of thumb, carpenters worked in units of eighths of an inch & engineers in tenths. The older chippies would say 4/8 instead of half an inch.

I'll give you an example of where this is still done today. My old company is the approved UK distributor for a well-known American flexible hose manufacturer. In the early 1980s I set up a workshop for manufacturing hoses commonly used on aircraft fuel, lubrication & hydraulic systems. (It's quite likely that we manufactured some of the hose assemblies on your flying club aircraft.) The parent company being based in the US all the measurements were in Imperial, as are the fittings & tools used to manufacture the hoses. One anomaly that we soon got used to being that the finished hose assemblies are measured in eighths of an inch (0304 = 30 1/2 inches) while the "cut off" dimensions for the end fittings required to calculate the actual length of the cut hose is in decimal inches (eg. 1.204 in). http://www.sacskyranch.com/h_len.htm

When manufacturing hoses to customer drawings we found that a lot of the drawing offices had adopted the metric system which caused unnecessary complications for us. This involved converting the metric measurements to Imperial before manufacture & converting back to measure the finished article in accordance with the customer requirement. This means that prospective employees for the hose shop have to be fully conversant with all systems. Unfortunately schools don't seem to appreciate this & only teach the metric system. As a result I spent a lot of my valuable time teaching them things that they should already know.

[G.K.]

Being proud upstanding men I guess there's always one measurement that will forever be imperial.

[Fozzer]

Being proud upstanding men I guess there's always one measurement that will forever be imperial.

Which doesn't have to include; "fractions of an Inch" to impress!... [smiley=thumbsup.gif]...!

Paul... ... ... ...!

[G.K.]

Being proud upstanding men I guess there's always one measurement that will forever be imperial.

Which doesn't have to include; "fractions of an Inch" to impress!... [smiley=thumbsup.gif]...!

Paul... ... ... ...!

Tip of the day:  always round up.

[Fozzer]

Being proud upstanding men I guess there's always one measurement that will forever be imperial.

Which doesn't have to include; "fractions of an Inch" to impress!... [smiley=thumbsup.gif]...!

Paul... ... ... ...!

Tip of the day:

[machineman9]

When manufacturing hoses to customer drawings we found that a lot of the drawing offices had adopted the metric system which caused unnecessary complications for us. This involved converting the metric measurements to Imperial before manufacture & converting back to measure the finished article in accordance with the customer requirement. This means that prospective employees for the hose shop have to be fully conversant with all systems. Unfortunately schools don't seem to appreciate this & only teach the metric system. As a result I spent a lot of my valuable time teaching them things that they should already know.

Wasn't there a fine example with NASA where the engineers were talking imperial, and the scientists were talking metric, and the two didn't quite translate properly, and one of their missions went a bit sour?


Thankfully, everything I do is in metric - physics is metric, maths is usually metric, electronics was based on physics (so metric) and technology used metric in their tools/CAD CAM machines/rulers.

I love the metric system

[ViperPilot]

When manufacturing hoses to customer drawings we found that a lot of the drawing offices had adopted the metric system which caused unnecessary complications for us. This involved converting the metric measurements to Imperial before manufacture & converting back to measure the finished article in accordance with the customer requirement. This means that prospective employees for the hose shop have to be fully conversant with all systems. Unfortunately schools don't seem to appreciate this & only teach the metric system. As a result I spent a lot of my valuable time teaching them things that they should already know.

Wasn't there a fine example with NASA where the engineers were talking imperial, and the scientists were talking metric, and the two didn't quite translate properly, and one of their missions went a bit sour?


Thankfully, everything I do is in metric - physics is metric, maths is usually metric, electronics was based on physics (so metric) and technology used metric in their tools/CAD CAM machines/ rulers.

I love the metric system

[multiprops]

Dear Fozzer: being a fellow motorcyclist, I recommend my method to deal with speedometers in kph/mph or vice versa: just remove the darn thing, like I did in my bike

While you are at it, go ahead and remove the mirrors too: after all "what comes behind really does not matter" (first rule of the Italian driver)  8-)