Heh…not in engineering we don’t. The only reason some (but certainly not all) American cars use metric fasteners is because many components are manufactured abroad and are in common with other, non-American cars. (General Motors used to be particuarly annoying about this, interchanging metric and SAE fasteners wherever it randomly suited them.)
There’s more to swtiching to metric than just changing a few measurements and switching road signs; dials, gauges, test fittings, and so forth are all calibrated to English units. Standard hydraulic and pneumatic fittings are made to SAE specs and are not interchangable (and in fact, many foreign-build hydraulic tools and equipment are forced to use SAE-standard fittings for compatibility). Standard building materials and raw metal stocks are all made to English dimensions, and unless you are Catepillar or John Deere and can order entire mill runs of material, you are not going to be able to order metal sheet in metric thicknesses. And every year the problem is compounded, as more equipment is manufactured to our increasingly antiquidated specification.
I used to work at a construction equipment manufacturer (telescopic material handlers) when the Engineer Manager got the bright idea that we were going to build our new flagship machine line in all metric–metric fasteners, high pressure metric hydraulics, metric engines, even specially formulated metric-thickness high strength corrosion resistant metric steel. :rolleyes: This lasted only so long as the team of purchasing agents and engineers (of which I was thankfully not one) reported how much it would cost to build such a machine; the conservative estimate was about an order of magnitude greater than building a machine out of standard material stock and SAE-spec powertrain and fasteners. Not to mention all of the extra tools we’d have to buy (or have the assemblers buy) in order to continue operating.
The reason we don’t–and until the Post-Industrial Morass finally wipes out manufacturing and engineering in this country, won’t–switch to metric is simple: inertia and cost, both of which are prohibitive difficulties.
As for people who “hate” metric; WTF? What is there to hate about it? It is a different–and frankly, much more consistant–system of measurement; one which doesn’t contain anachonisms such as ergs, British Thermal Units, horsepower, rods, slugs, drachms, hogsheads, pennyweights, acres, perches, chains, Imperial vs. Standard bushels, gallons, short tons vs gross tones, et cetera, and all the accompanying, obfuscating, and unmemorable conversion factors required. Any student of science or engineering knows that calculations using metric measurements are a hell of a lot less prone to being farked up by some misapplied conversion than the anachronistic measurements of the English system.
Stranger