Have a young friend, engineering grad, that works for Boeing. His job is translating design engineers dreams into old fashioned 'blueprints' for r&d labs/machine shops. In the early stages of development, a tool or a part is now more frequently spec'd in Imperial..even though, in the end I guess it goes back to metric to be fed as a software program in cnc languages. I asked why?
He claims the best r&d machinists and tool and die makers, consider metric "clunky". He claims, once you get down to subdivisions of the length of the King's finger, thousandth's and ten thousandths are incredibly easy and intuitive to work with, just moving the decimal point. Somebody above pointed out, the jump from a meter, the basic unit to hundredths of a mm starts getting up into too many zeros to the right of the decimal point for an average guy to carry in his head.
I would like to hear some of the machinist guys on here comment on this. My lathes and mill are Imperial, so that's what I use, I suppose if the machines were metric, that is what I would use. It's for certain, a cnc computer doesn't give a damn.
