Metric vs Imperial Units

reboot wrote: By your reasoning nobody makes anything in any units. That 1/2" wrench? It was made in 12.7mm, even though for other markets only 12 or 13mm wrenches are available?

Speaking of which, why the fuck are there so many metric wrench sizes? Why the hell should metric wrench sizes even exist? If all nuts were in imperial units, does that somehow make space shuttles fall out of the sky?

The problem with the metric system isn't so much the idea of having one standard to replace the hodgepodge of units which existed before it (especially for engineering and science), but how it was forced onto every niche without consideration for whether it made sense outside that context. The US fluid ounce works well for cooking and feet work well for construction. There is nothing to be gained by metric wrenches, metric cooking, or metric rulers in construction. In these cases it's just a fetish like the old, stupid idea that all sciences should boil down to physics.

This isn't a blanket statement. Machining, for example, already uses thousandths of an inch so using metric instead (although initially costly) wouldn't be as big a deal. Meters, although NOT a naturally useful length (like feet and yards, which can be estimated easily by the average frame) will eventually supplant miles for distances and should make converting elevation gain to pitch (on, say, a topo) easier.

Kyle Tarry wrote: You're incorrect about what "base" means. Units do not have a "base". Fractions are certainly not "base 2" (unless you do fractions in binary). Does 1/4 = 1/100? Everything we do on a normal day-to-day basis, imperial or metric, is base 10. If you have 9 inches and you add one, how many do you have? 10. 1-0. That is because we could in base 10. The fact that there is a multi-page thread where people are arguing for the metric system is really sad.

Have you even seen a US ruler? Fractions of an inch, outside of machining, are in base 2.

0.1 in binary is 1/2. 0.01 in binary is 1/4. It's base 2, and if you can't understand that, that's what sad.

What base 2 looks like if you're unable to think outside base 10:

Ball wrote: Speaking of which, why the fuck are there so many metric wrench sizes? Why the hell should metric wrench sizes even exist? If all nuts were in imperial units, does that somehow make space shuttles fall out of the sky? The problem with the metric system isn't so much the idea of having one standard to replace the hodgepodge of units which existed before it (especially for engineering and science), but how it was forced onto every niche without consideration for whether it made sense outside that context. The US fluid ounce works well for cooking and feet work well for construction. There is nothing to be gained by metric wrenches, metric cooking, or metric rulers in construction. In these cases it's just a fetish like the old, stupid idea that all sciences should boil down to physics. This isn't a blanket statement. Machining, for example, already uses thousandths of an inch so using metric instead (although initially costly) wouldn't be as big a deal. Meters, although NOT a naturally useful length (like feet and yards, which can be estimated easily by the average frame) will eventually supplant miles for distances and should make converting elevation gain to pitch (on, say, a topo) easier.

Metric wrenches: Because if you're doing everything else metric, it's dumb to change as soon as you need to tighten something. My US made car (GM) is kind of a pain because of the mishmash of systems. My European made car (VW) is pretty easy, because everything is metric. That's a product of our stubbornness as much as anything else.

Cooking: Works fine both ways, the easier one is usually the one you learned in. The caveat here being is that baking is more and more moving to metric, and more and more measure by weight and not volume.

Construction: Imperial works for construction standards here because they were built around imperial. Standards in any given country will usually match the measurement system... And standards change all the time anyway. My house was built with 24" stud spacing, which was common at the time.

A meter is about exactly as useful as a yard if you're guestimating off of the average frame. They're so close to each other that for guestimation purposes they're virtually interchangeable.

reboot wrote: So you chose a different interpretation of "in" to argue with me about?

What?
I´ll try to explain this simply. Company X in the USA orders say a million pairs of pants from a Chinese company. The machines will be programmed to cut the cloth in millimeteres as the Chinese use the metric system. A label is sewn inside with about 10 different clothing sizing systems to suit the markets it will be sold in.
Same with wrenches or anything else. Your 1/2" has been defined using metres in the USA for over a hundred years. Even the rule you use is made to a metric standard though the graduations and numbers on it are different.
All just numbers and the base of the numbers is the same the world wide.

Jim Titt wrote: What? I´ll try to explain this simply.

I know exactly what you are saying. I wrote "made in ft & inches" to mean the "end product in simple numbers of ft & inches", because you know, this is not an engineering forum, most of us don't care whether things are measured in SI units during the manufacturing of the product. Just like I don't expect you to care the inner working of a computer in a non-computer discussion forum.

JK- wrote: Metric wrenches: Because if you're doing everything else metric

That's a problem of 2 standards. But what ball said is true (too many metric wrenches), as increment of 1mm works well in the smaller end of bolts, but once you get to ~15mm, having every bolt up to 30mm or more in increments of 1mm is an overkill (relative change in percentage is too small) and where the fraction based method would be better.

reboot wrote: That's a problem of 2 standards. But what ball said is true (too many metric wrenches), as increment of 1mm works well in the smaller end of bolts, but once you get to ~15mm, having every bolt up to 30mm or more in increments of 1mm is an overkill (relative change in percentage is too small) and where the fraction based method would be better.

It's not like we don't have the same problem is some places. If we could just stick to 1/8, 1/4, 1/2 it would be awesome. But then I end up with wrenches like 1/2, 5/8, 17/32. The 5/8 I'll forgive, but why in the hell couldn't we just make the 17/32 one of the other two?

And hopefully we can all agree that tiny hexes are a PITA regardless of which system is used.

Ball, your interpretation of base is quite unique. I'm guessing, well hoping you are joking. Inches are base 12? Are you a mathematical comedian?

Ultimately, markets decide. My company buys a lot of german equipment to be installed in the usA. For many years they provided adapters for the American market. Since the demand has grown and to be more competitive and attractive, they are now manufacturing with no adapters needed. They are "American ready".

JK- wrote: It's not like we don't have the same problem is some places.

We do, but 17/32 sticks out like a sore thumb. But between 11,12,13,14mm, 16,17,18,19mm or 21,22,23,24mm? Not so much. And as a consequence a set of metric wrenches to those sizes usually contains all of them (the worst is when a set contains 10,11,13,15 instead of 10,12,14,15).

reboot wrote: I know exactly what you are saying. I wrote "made in ft & inches" to mean the "end product in simple numbers of ft & inches", because you know, this is not an engineering forum, most of us don't care whether things are measured in SI units during the manufacturing of the product. Just like I don't expect you to care the inner working of a computer in a non-computer discussion forum.

Ah well, I intepreted "made" in the literal sense of manufacturing, not whether a tee shirt is labelled XXXL.
Your metric wrench example is, dare I say it, a bit wierd. The metric series doesn´t go in 1mm steps up to 30mm. From 10mm they are 13,17,19,24 and 30. Unless you buy Japanese stuff in which case you´ll need a 12 and 14 as well. Bit simpler than those boxes of 29/64th´s and whatever rubbish I´ve rusting under my workbench.
By default the USA is going metric, your aviation industry has, your car industry has and the rest will follow on in a global world. For the normal guy in the street most things stay the same though, even in the UK we stayed with pints of beer and miles on the road signs because nobody could be bothered to change them. But they are defined using the metric system even so.

Wow, the arguments and assertions in this thread crack me up.

If we forgot the imperial system entirely and only focused on metric, the benefits would be extremely obvious, across the board for every form of measuring.

Inches.....base 12.....fractions......base 2...... Bahahahahaha!!!

Jim Titt wrote: The metric series doesn´t go in 1mm steps up to 30mm. From 10mm they are 13,17,19,24 and 30. Unless you buy Japanese stuff in which case you´ll need a 12 and 14 as well.

And in bicycle terms everything from 12-19mm in 1mm increments are used (and often require their own thin profile wrenches). Many more in-between sizes of 19-30mm are also common (although in the larger sizes substituting between metric & imperial isn't a big problem in a pinch).

Jim Titt wrote: By default the USA is going metric, your aviation industry has, your car industry has and the rest will follow on in a global world. For the normal guy in the street most things stay the same though, even in the UK we stayed with pints of beer and miles on the road signs because nobody could be bothered to change them. But they are defined using the metric system even so.

That's totally fine with me. My issue has always been trying to make the normal guy on the street switch even though it doesn't do anything for him.

Kyle Tarry wrote:Just because a few fractions convert to simple values in base 2 doesn't make them base 2.

Everything on that section of the ruler can be expressed in base 2 form of xxx.xxxx (and actually covers all values between 00.0000 to 100.0000) w/o rounding errors or a lot of unused values.

Kyle Tarry wrote:How about 1/3?

1/3 cannot be represented in base 2 or base 10 w/o rounding error (though computers don't have much trouble storing extra digits). Probably why there are 12 inches to a foot, 60 seconds to a minute, 24 hours to a day, or 360 degrees to a circle. Mathematicians understood that well before engineers decided everything should be in base 10.

So now we're arguing that because something can be expressed in binary makes it base two, and that 1.1 = 1.02 = 1-1/2 is somehow more user friendly?

And lets not get into circles... Because there are going to be rounding errors in almost all applications unless we go with base pi.

reboot wrote: And in bicycle terms everything from 12-19mm in 1mm increments are used (and often require their own thin profile wrenches). Many more in-between sizes of 19-30mm are also common (although in the larger sizes substituting between metric & imperial isn't a big problem in a pinch). That's totally fine with me. My issue has always been trying to make the normal guy on the street switch even though it doesn't do anything for him.

Yup, bicycle threads and all that stuff. Back in the day we were expected to be conversant with something like 72 different systems and about half of them are still around even in metric land. For simple threaded stuff the UK managed to dump about 41 different sizes to just seven in metric which was cool.
The issue of the "man in the street" is the same one the UK faced, loads of grumpy old carpenters with thumbs "exactly" an inch wide and all that. As usual money won, the metrication of the uK was driven by the industry and they paid the bills so the politicians thought it was great and let them do it. A few bits they left alone to keep the Luddites happy like changing road distances (the government would have had to pay for that so left it as it was) but the rest was just industry saying it´s going to happen.
The death knell for the old system was joining the EU where basically all laws have to be in SI units.
Astoundingly even the lazy Brits managed to cope with changing building regs and stuff like that, we just gave the workers new tape measures.
Most of the objections (apart from people who can´t apparently differentiate between metrication and decimalisation) are from ignorance exactly how flexible the metric system is. Moonshiners can keep their quarts or whatever like the Euros have their own wierd stuff. It´s just whether they are the preferred unit or one commonly used and it´s much more flexible than most people realise, we have acres (tagwerk) as well as hectares over here and buy grain in zentner which is about the same as a hundredweight. I use a unit called the MTE sometimes in some work I do here in Germany, it´s the unit of how much a standardised farm animal eats in dry weight, how much shit it produces and how much methane. It´s defined in the metric system for sure but it´s just a useful measure of some things we want to know and easily scaled to various animals like chickens.

Jim Titt wrote: how much shit it produces

My kind of unit...

JK- wrote:So now we're arguing that because something can be expressed in binary makes it base two

You forgot expressed well. At that point, it's just a matter of semantics.

JK- wrote:and that 1.1 = 1.02 = 1-1/2 is somehow more user friendly?

1.1b = 1.5d = 1-1/2
1.111b = 1.125d = 1-1/8
1.1111b = 1.0625d = 1-1/16
See how every time you add precision you have to rewrite all the decimal points (and some numbers in the decimal systems are never used)?
User friendliness greatly depends who the end users are. Decimal is natural hand counting system, but lousy for common division.

JK- wrote:And lets not get into circles... Because there are going to be rounding errors in almost all applications unless we go with base pi.

I was talking about angles expressed in degree. Pi (like e) is an irrational number; no integer based system can express it well.

Kyle Tarry wrote: Of course they can. You can convert any number from one base to another. They could also be expressed in base 3, base 4, or base 20.

So you decided to skip the most important part of what I wrote: w/o rounding errors or a lot of unused values.

Kyle Tarry wrote: Inches ARE in base 10! Seconds are in base 10!

By your own logic inches and seconds are units, not a base system. But everything you & I typing on are represented in base 2, so there.

Btw, nobody is confused between unit system and base system (but any unit system has one or more base increment systems), you just decided to interpret what people write in the most retarded way.

Jim Titt wrote: The issue of the "man in the street" is the same one the UK faced, loads of grumpy old carpenters with thumbs "exactly" an inch wide and all that. As usual money won, the metrication of the uK was driven by the industry and they paid the bills so the politicians thought it was great and let them do it.

Interesting to compare this to the US. As a scientist, I'm quite happy living and working in a metric world, but I understand the problem the average American has with the metric system. Especially given the horrendous introduction to it that was tried back in the 70's, where people were expected to embrace a system given such nonsense as:

A meter is 39.37 inches
A gallon is 3785 milliliters
An ounce is 28.35 grams

and so on. I mean, who's going to want a system where everything is a strange conversion factor. It seems no one taught it as:

A milliliter of water weighs one gram
A cm^3 in also a milliliter of volume
The density of water is one
A liter of water weighs one kg

Moving WITHIN the metric system is super, super easy. It's getting there from here that is hard.

Neither system is fundamentally better for the average Joe on the street. I think it's wrong to sell it that way. (But carry on arguing that point in this thread!) The metric system makes doing business on a global scale easier, but Mr. Average doesn't care about that as long as he can buy cheap crap at Walmart.

But my real take-away is that the US never converted because, as Jim says above, "money won". Only in the US it was the pushback from US manufacturers who were looking at the money, as hundreds of thousands of blueprints and material specifications would need to be re-written at a cost (to industry, not to the government) of untold billions of dollars. And of course in our capitalistic country, the unified voice of industry was heard by the elected leaders (I'm sure the transition cost was expressed in "jobs lost in your district" as that seems to be how to get a politician's attention). And thus we never followed-up on the grand plan to adopt the metric system.