Now in my mind an “Imperial set” would be either British Standard, or Whitworth. Which most US mechanics do not have.
I must be a very “serious US mechanic” as I have both metric and American (SAE), as well as both British standard and Whitworth tools.
While most folks think that British Standard & Witworth are the same, when the British Standard first came out it was different by one size. IIRC, A 5/8ths BS would equate to a 9/16 W. In any case I have at least one set of each of them.
I buy old rigs, so most of them are all American, or all new BS/Whitworth. Yet the Subarus & the VWs are all metric.
The hour isn’t a metric unit (though it is a “non-SI unit accepted for use with SI”). If it were SI, it would be priced in megajoules (3.6 MJ == 1 kWh).
Electric cars have a similarly amusing unit equivalence. EV efficiency is typically measured in watt-hours/mile, which as it happens is a unit of force. So the pound is also a unit of efficiency. My Model 3 gets about 240 Wh/mi, which translates into 121 pounds. If you hung me from a rope and pulley system that pulled on the car, I could keep it going at >65 mph.
Right. I think a lot of people don’t realize when they hear that the price of gold is so many dollars per ounce, that that’s a different ounce than the one they’re familiar with.
The Troy ounce is the weight of a baggie of cannabis sold you by a dealer named Troy.
I recently received a new knee. My feet remain the same but my legs are off by 15mm. I’ve not measured my feet’s linear or areal differences lately because they change with whatever I’ve dropped on them.
Is a foot-pound the measure of what you can pound with your feet?
From what I read about the Focus and Mustang at least, they are all metric now, probably because of all the Ford vehicles sold/designed/produced in Canada/Europe/Australia/Mexico/etc. There are some sizes like 19mm that a 3/4" socket will fit on, which probably adds a little confusion.
But hardware in aftermarket parts can often be imperial.
A few years back, I went to a technical conference in Toronto. I started talking with an associate (He was Canadian) about a problem I was having my product. He asked for the measurement of my product. I gave him the particulars, in English measurements, (inches, weight). He (politely) ranted about us Americans and our English measurement system. That everyone else in the World is using the Metric system and why Americans refuse to convert
After a long afternoon of brainstorming, We decided to table our technical talk to dinner but he continued to complain about the English Measurement system. We had a couple of cocktails and ordered some appetizers and he ordered Rib-eye. A 20 oz Rib-eye steak. After the waiter left, I asked if what he ordered.
He said yea, a Rib-eye steak.
“How Big” I asked.
“20 Ounce”.
I chided him for not ordering a 567 gram steak? :smack:
Which barrel? There’s about a dozen of them, maybe more. Which one is used mostly depends on what you’re measuring but sometimes where you’re doing the measuring.
OK, you’re probably using the oil barrel for that, unless your car runs on alcohol, in which case you may be using the beer barrel.
Fake precision. A European restaurant menu would have featured a 300-gram steak, a 500-gram steak, etc. (Etc meaning smaller cuts, but not bigger, as how many people even order a 500g steak?)
Maybe your gung-ho associate was simply reluctant to start his argument with the chef cooking his food.
I get all that. I meant, a 567 g steak has no place on a restaurant menu any more than one would be listed as 17.64 oz, as the extra digits give a false sense of precision.
As for why a kitchen in Toronto would prefer to use U.S. measurements, no idea, but I wouldn’t start an argument with them about it! In the US there are other idiosyncratic cooking practices like measuring liquids by volume instead of by weight, but, again, either I would assume the chef is a professional who knows what he or she is doing, or, if I had reason to doubt it, I would simply avoid eating there.
You are completely missing the point of the anecdote. My associate was complaining that, other than the USA, the rest of the world was using the metric system, yet minutes later he ordered a 20 oz steak in Toronto.
I only converted the 20 oz into grams to get the 567 grams
I sold US products in Japan and would have to deal with false precision all the f*cking time! There were products with ranges of 300’ which would be converted to 91.44 m when the actual range varied by up to 50’, perhaps more.
You are also missing DPRK point about false precision. Had the steak been sold in metric units, it wouldn’t be converted the precisely.
