Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Americans Will Do Anything To Avoid The Metric System.

For those that only dabble in math then sure the Metric system works but for those who have to apply said math then it sucks. If you ever had to work off a print that was converted to inches from metric or inches to metric you would see the light. That and still today most measuring devices are still inch. Add to this that often the smallest dimension on metric measuring devices is .5 MM which is 0.019685, kind of coarse actually when your tolerances are inside .001. .1mm is still more than .003 inch at 0.003937. Face it for making tight tolerance parts metric is not as easy to use. This all said when the inch is divided into thousandths all the way out the math is just as simple as the math for metric.

The metric system is based on a certain fraction of the speed of light, a constant, not old arbitrary made up measurements like other systems. It should be the world's standard. But people are most comfortable using what they were taught when they were young, myself included. Our science teachers tried to teach us the metric system when I was in school in the 70s and early 80s with varying success. Some people have poor understanding of mathematics in general. Unfortunately I am one of them and I did poorly learning metric, my understanding of it is rudimentary at best. The USA should have went ahead with the changeover during the 1970's, fifty years of accommodation would have been done and everyone would have been used to metric and comfortable with it by now. It will probably never happen because of all the "we're great and superior" jingoism. Maybe better anyways at least in my lifetime, I'm too old to learn it now.

What's the smallest metric unit of length? Hint: It's not millimeters. Millimeters are divided into micrometers, which are divided into nanometers, which are divided into picometers, then femtometers, etc. ad infinitum.

Therein lies the rub. It is not the working in metric which is difficult. It is the jumping back and forth, and remembering all the conversion factors.

If the US had adopted metric 100 years ago, there would be no need for making conversions. The only time you would need to even think about an SAE measurement might be if restoring some machine 100 yrs old, made before the conversion.

We may as well get used to it, it's here to stay.

Anyone want to go to the old British system of Pounds, and Shillings?

So is that really easier than adding a 0 after the decimal point? That said one micrometer jumps down to the point of being overly small at 0.00003937 inch's. .0001 equals 2.54 micrometers, which number would you rather calculate with?.001 being 25.4 micrometers which would you rather calculate with?

It's not about the preference. The "reasoning" behind the preference is faulty.

The problem is, you are still thinking conversions.

If working in metric, that is all you do. Just move the decimal point. If you were running metric, your tolerance would not be 2.54 microns. It would be 2 microns, or 3 microns. Just as in the previous example with .003 inches.

You just move the decimal, whether working with the infinitesimally small or infinitely large.

Has anyone ever expressed the distance from Chicago to Boston in inches and decimals? No, it is miles, and rods, (admittedly archaic, but still on plats), yards, and feet. Oh yes, don't leave out furlongs.

I grew up with both, and don't really care which I use, as long as the lathe, mill or whatever is graduated in the same system.

A standard metric micrometer is graduated in hundredths of a millimetre, which is a smaller dimension than the thousandths of an inch a standard Imperial mic is showing. No big deal either way, and there isn't a lot outside of toolmaking that requires more accuracy than +-0.01mm (slightly smaller than half a thou).

Fabricating in mm I find easier than converting to Imperial - adding 64ths, eighths and the rest is just a pain in the butt. 620mm + 510mm is a simple thing, 2' 13/32" + 1' 6 5/64" - who needs that bs?

As for volume and weight, easy win to metric. A litre of water weighs a kilogram, a thousand of them weigh a ton and they fill a cubic metre. Thermal calcs are the same win to metric.

It's a bit like learning another language - it all seems clumsy until it falls into place, then it's easy.

Typically you would measure parts that long with a scale or a steel tape and either method is easy. And why would you be adding such dimensions anyway? Typically overall lengths are on the print. Adding fractions is too hard for you? Usually dimensions listed in fractions have large tolerances. The point is either way of measuring is pretty easy with the win going to SAE. By the way a thousand Kilos does not weigh a ton. That said are teaspoons, tablespoons and fractions of cups all that hard to follow? Quarts and gallon beyond your ability to grasp? Public school?