The Model A Ford had wood-on-leather bearings. Several of the tools used to work on classic Ford cars would look unusual to you. Others, like the adjustable wrench, would look usual to you, but looked odd to farmers at the time.
The bolts and nuts were mostly ordinary 1/8ths, 16ths, 32nds. I don’t know how the dimensions of the car were measured: I’d guess feet, inches, fractions, as ordinary things were at the time. Later, car manufacturers moved to having /all/ dimensions in 1/1000s of an inch (‘thou’ or ‘mil’). If Ford was using ‘tenths’, that would have been a tenth of a thou, about 2.5 μm, and that would have been a tolerance, not a dimension. Nothing on the model T would have been toleranced that accurately.
In Aus, dimensions moved to /all/ mm, due to manufacturing workers being unable to handle decimal fractions and metric conversions like mm/cm/m/km.
I remember in drafting class, I had to use a nifty ruler with six scales on it, an engineer’s scale. One of the scales is marked in tenths of an inch. The link shows you the other divisions.
You wouldn’t perhaps be able to summarize it here, would you?
Bovine units would be an indicator of quality, not quantity.
What? That’s the actual beauty and key to the utility of the metric system, the incredibly simple conversion factor, IMHO. Here’s a fun way to remember the order/value of the SI prefixes: make your own lyrics to the tune of [url=Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron Lyrics - The Royal Guardsmen]Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron.
Yeah, this is the Republican base. I eventually gave up talking to many of my relatives just because of this.
Having lived for 30 years in metric countries, it really doesn’t matter one way or another for most things. The segment is just another way of getting their base angry about foreigners.
Decimal inches are common in electronics.
Traditionally, IC pin spacing was in .1 or .05 inch increments. Even now, as everything moves to metric, it’s very, very common to see pin spacings of 2.54mm or 1.27mm.
Then there are edge connectors, which often have spacings of .156" - which turns out to be 5/32…
Not necessarily the exact same stride, specially if your roads are crappy, but close enough to make the sergeant happy; when the sergeant is unhappy, everybody is unhappy. And now I’m wondering if archeologists know any cadences from the Roman or Macedonian armies
The U.S. was a leader in the metricization of currency for its own sake! The original American standard was that a silver dollar had the average weight of worn-down Spanish pieces of eight reales, so the base unit was a reale, called a “bit” in the States, and worth 12½ cents. However no one-bit coin was ever minted: the first coin minted by the U.S. Treasury was the silver half-disme; it took 2½ half-dismes to make a bit. No wonder that when pries are quoted in bits, it’s almost always an even number of bits.
The silver half-disme was a short-lived coin. Nickel mines wanted in on the action and named the replacement for the half-disme after themselves.
[quote="beowulff, post:66, topic:835256"]
Decimal inches are common in electronics.
Traditionally, IC pin spacing was in .1 or .05 inch increments.
[/QUOTE]
Back in the Triassic Era, most of the ICs I worked with had two rows of 8 pins each with 0.1 inch spacing. However IIRC, IBM's MST-2 IC's had four rows of 4 pins (arranged in a square) with ⅛ inch spacing. IBM did everything differently from The.Rest.of.the.World. Allegedly this was to make it harder for IBM technicians and engineers to find work at other companies.
Thais are lovers, not fighters and have an ecumenical system for quoting the dimensions of wooden boards. Thickness is given in inches, width in centimeters, length in sok (the Traditional Thai measure). :smack:
Yes, I can’t even count the number of times every day when I need to divide a foot into three parts and thank God that it comes out to a nice even number of inches. Just think of how often that happens in your life.
Also, it’s so great that I only need to divide a foot into thirds and never have to do that with quarts or pints or pounds or tons or acres.
But don’t even get me started on how often I need to divide a meter into fifths. Good thing I never need to do that with a foot.
I’ll simply observe, as someone who has had the opportunity to work in both systems exclusively as well as in a mix: If you ever get the chance to work in metric only, you will *never *want to go back to those stupid inches and pounds and fractions ever again.
As far as I know all manufacturing industry uses metric system in US because subcontractors could be from anywhere on the planet. Also university teaching is done in metric system and so is health care except for body temperature which is given in Farenheits. Military uses metrics also.
So grocery stores, gas pumps, mapping including all roads and speed limits and weather forecasts us non-metric units.
