Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Question about metric conversion

Some of you don't know the correct definition of an irrational number.

My fault. I was thinking it was the wrong term when I posted it, but was too lazy to look it up. I should have said repeating decimal.

Irrational applies better to people who defend the hodge-podge system of measurements that uses inches, feet, yards, fathoms, rods, chains, furlongs, miles, and leagues all to measure distance.


Jerry

Yet, the good old USA is the only country in the world still holding on to the imperial system.

Stop trying to convert inches into metric & just embrace it. It's here to stay.

I agree whole heartedly on the 2 sets of tools sucking, but myself & my mechanics/technician's still manage to get our work done without bitching !

Yep, true, but due to the USA, imperial is still out there.

Even domestic vehicles (chevy/GMC) are "mostly" metric now !

I don't know about you, but I'd sure rather multiply or divide by 10 than 12, any & every day of the week.

Ya, that's about as sensible, as your original argument !

I'll never forget when we were changing over to metric in Canada. I was driving along a road and there was sewer work going on. They had signs out about reducing your speed, watching for workers, etc. One sign read, "Speed limit 40 km/h for the next 3 miles."

And there were those silly stickers that you could buy at most stores. They had 10 stickers (10, 20, 30 etc. to 100) that you put on the dash to show where the km/h speeds were in relation to the mph nos. The back of the pkg had a picture of an mph speedometer with km/h stickers in the proper spots.

And all the news stories of police ticketing "speeders". People who saw the new metric signs - Maximum Speed 80 km/h, for example - but drove 80 mph because they didn't get the memo. The funny thing was, the new metric signs were bolted above or below the older mph ones.

For our US listeners, we had a year long ad campaign the year prior to metrification, explaining what the new signs would look like, an explanation of the km/h speeds and how they related to mph, etc. Television, magazines, radios, billboards, mailings, and more. Despite the amount of time and ad blitz, thousands of people across the country weren't listening. The government coffers swelled with "metric money", most of it from speeders.
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WRT the metric vs SAE discussion everyone is enjoying - newsflash - metric is taking over. For North America, you're about 50 years too late. It's already 80 to 90% done. It happened, not by decree, but by gradually introducing it into the US. Machinists, manufacturers, contractors and others have to use metric in order to get contracts and sales outside the US. And as has already been pointed out, pop the hood on your car or truck.

You can run, but you cannot hide!

We heard the "Damn it! I'm not gonna change, and they cannot make me!" people years ago. Nothing new here. You can beat your chest and scream, "I'll die before I change!"

We'll reply with,"Why yes...yes you will."

Just remember, sympathy is found between schitt and syphilis in the dictionary.

From 1975. 14.4 cents a litre was 65 cents a gallon (imperial) or about 54.5 cents per US gallon.



P.S. Here is my rifle list.

5.6×15mmR
5.56×35mmR
5.56x43mm
5.56x45mm
5.56x49mm

6x45mm
6x52mm

7.62x39mm
7.62x51mmR
7.62x56R
7.62×63mm

7.62x54R
7.92×57mm
7.95x55R
7.95×56mmR

9×33mmR
9x41mmR

10.9x29mmR
10.9×33mmR
10.9x57mmR

11.4x53R
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When they stickered over MPH. Circa 1977.

As a new, young driver in California in the 1960's, I remember being impressed by an item on the news.
Some celebrity from Europe was stopped for going 100 mph on California Highway 101.
He claimed that he seriously thought 101 was the speed limit. He got the ticket anyway.

Well, you gotta give him an A for effort. Not that it did him any good.

I'm surprised that we're still using ft-lbs, grains and fps instead of Newton-Metres, grams, and metres per second up here. Until 2016, we were still teaching those archaic measurements at the military school where I taught.

I learned the conversion factors in high school more than 60 years ago, and dealing with metric weights and measures has really never been a problem. When pocket calculators came along, the results were both quicker and more accurate. Now we have calculators on our "smart phones." I don't understand the anxiety and resentment.

Funny thing the Canadian metric system.
Every time I ever ask a Canadian directions, up there, they used miles.
I always ask miles or kilometres?
And I always heard, "We use miles more than kilometers".
That was 20 years ago, those older folk may be the exception today.


Your F'n metric system damn near killed me.
I was in Montreal during a snowstorm, load of paper in the trailer.
The ramp was posted 45. A good old American boy, new to Canadian ways,
I slowed down to 40. A little too fast for that turn. Things got real, real quick!
Nothing got bent, nothing even stained(it was close, young muscles saved the BVD's)!

Well maybe it was my fault?
I never forgot to watch that again.

Many people here mix miles and km. For the over 50 crowd, we learned miles, feet, and pounds, etc. in school. We get a lot of US television and movies, so miles, feet, and pounds, etc., so we see and hear it constantly. Gas mileage is used more than litres per 100 km. At least, around where I live.

In grocery store flyers, it's cheaper to advertise in lb, instead of kg. Would you rather pay $1.49/lb or $3.29/kg for hamburger? The law says advertisers must use kgs, litres etc. but many flyers have lb in bigger type than their metric equivalents. Gas is exclusively advertised in litres, but other fluids are a mix of metric and Imperial.

Justin Trudeau's father, Pierre, started it. I don't know how many more years it will take before we have completely switched over, but having you next door has slowed the conversion. It's like speaking two languages and being fluent in both. I don't see any problems with it.

You guys have hamburger for $1.49/lb?

I'm gonna have to head to Canada to load up on beef.

The point is that metric has no real method for fractions and is a damn fool method of measuring. Multiplying by 12 does not happen because you use the 1' instead of the number 12. Yes I used both sets of tools to work on cars, motorcycles and boats to this day. Name ONE instance where metric made doing that easier, just one.

A fathom equals 6 feet, a measure of water depth.

A furlong is equal to 1/8th of a mile.

A league was the distance a man could walk in an hour, a vague distance and league is not used as a measurement in any nation currently. I can only say math is not your strong point.

I have long ago stocked up on metric sockets and wrenches. Lucky for us the metric sockets still fit on 1/4", 3/8", 1/2" and 3/4" ratchets and breaker bars! I am not bitching just pointing out the obvious. Compare with Imperial to Metric table and it is so obvious even a caveman can see it!


The Imperial method of measuring is also here to stay as it provides a better, more flexible, easier method of measuring along with simple fractions. It has been said the metric system is one of the reasons we beat the Germans in WWII. Why Nixon screwed us and did not demand Europe go to the imperial system is impossible to fathom! Ask anyone using advanced math in engineering which is still generally dominated by the inch as is reloading.

57.5 grains of IMR 4350 equals 3.725 grams. Now having never seen a reloading scale in grams though I believe they exist which would you rather measure out on a beam balance scale? I admit the electronic scales would solve any issues but still you are looking at 4 numbers and a decimal point instead of three.

A Canadian! I do not believe we will ever completely switch to the metric system, the Imperial system having too many advantages, especially where precision measuring has to be done. And this is probably why the Imperial system has shown such resilience in the face of the rest of the world. Not "just" because Americans are so stubborn!

More like the opposite is the case. Consider units of length for example. The metric symbol has metres (m). There are prefixes for various multiples and fractions of a meter, such as thousands (mm), hundredths (cm), or thousands (km). That is it.

In Imperial you have the thou, inch, foot, yard, fathom, chain, furlong, mile, nautical mile and league.

Now for volume, in metric you have the same metre, but now cubed (m3). You have the same prefixes, so mm3, cm3, km3, so it is easy to remember. There are also litres, largely for fluid measures, again with the same prefixes.

In Imperial you have cubic inches, cubic feet, cubic yards, etc, but you also have fl. oz, gill, quart, fifth, and gallon, both US and Imperial. Then there's pecks and bushels, and you also have apothecaries' measures, like the scruple, the fluid minim and the fluid drachm. So now, how many minims to the gill, without checking a table?

Weights? Metric has the gram and the tonne. Handily for some purposes, a cubic metre of water (SG 1) weighs a tonne, making it possible to calculate weights and volumes easily, including for materials of different SG.

Imperial has grains, drachms, ounces, pounds, stones, quarters, hundredweights, short and long tons. There are also two other sets of weight measures in troy and apothecaries weight systems. How many drachms to a short ton? What is the volume of a short ton of steel ingot, nominal SG 8?

I did two years of it, and it had about as much to do with inches (or for that matter, metres) as duck feathers have to do with philosophy.



The fourth significant figure on your measurement in grams would mean that it is theoretically to a greater degree of precision. However, the typical beam balance is not actually capable of that level of precision, so it is rather spurious. Render it as 3.73 g and you are within a margin less than the resolution of a typical reloader's scale of your 57.5 gn. FWIW I throw all of my charges anyway, and use a metric measurement. It works.

Anxiety no, resenting having to punch in more numbers to get the correct answer yes. When one spends hours at a time standing up programing a machine on the shop floor extra key punches add up. Add to that editing a program in metric that isn't going as planned is a true pain. I realize most do not have to use dimensions as small as .0001 or .00254 in metric but to act as if an extra number and 3 different numbers is immaterial when calculating angles/ radius or even simple addition and subtraction is very flippant. Try it sometime. I can add and subtract .0001 without a calculator but multiples of the metric equivalent require a calculator.

Precision measuring depends on the device and the standard you calibrate it with. It has nothing to do with the graduations on the device. Having said that, the really high precision devices tend to be calibrated in metric - measuring to nanometres or less. As well, they are all calibrated off metric reference standards - even your Imperial measurements are based off metric reference standards.