Metric vs Imperial poll

Any idea which standard is the official US one?

Thought some of you might be interested in some trivia. A number of years back I worked on a US Navy contract for small boats, and we had to have our measuring instruments checked against a national standard. The boat was being built in imperial even though the propulsion system was metric and the tubes (it was Rigid Inflatable) were metric. I checked out what was the national standard for length, and lo and behold the only official standard for the U.S. of A is the metre. (spelled meter). I would have to look up the source again, but apparently about the time of the Boston Tea Party the government of the US put the metre into law as the only official length measure. They then said that because they were doing so much business with Great Britain, they made an official conversion factor to inches. Of interest, our company guessed that we would be selling the boat to more countries than the US, so did all the CAD drawings with two dimension layers, one imperial and one metric. When the US Navy came back a year or two later and wanted the boat in metric to work out with the other NATO countries etc, it was pretty simple to redo the drawings. I think we just gave them the drawing set we did for Canada, France and a couple of other countries. All in all it wasn't much trouble working with both.

 

When is America going to shed the oppressive Imperial yoke imposed by Britain?

By the way, official definition of an inch is 25.4 millimeters.

Yoke(bi-metric)butt.

 

Global markets now make no system close to being STANDARD. We are stuck with all of them forever. USN ships & planes speeds are knots, every thing else is yards. " Speed 300knts @ range 6000yds @ elevation 600 feet-- Pilot weighs 6 stones".

 

Came to think of the ISO/DIS 12215-5.2 (ISO scantling rules for mono hulls) I read I while back when reading this thread. Most of the countries in the developed world are actually planning to require new yachts sold in their country to comply with at least some of the ISO rules to be allowed to be sold. It’s not going to come tomorrow but it will come one day. And they are in metric; only exception I have found is knots.

Will we get American translations of the standards? You can still put 2’ pipes in the boats and make them 40 foot long but you must at least try a bit. I wouldn’t want to see the American boatbuilding business locked out from a big chunk of the world market.

Always smile when I watch CNBC and see that its 52 degrees in CHIna (big country China, can you be a bit more specific, Tibet or the Gobi desert), 46 degrees in BOSnia, 80 in INDia, 66 in the PHiLippines. Not even 40 year old Brits have been taught Fahrenheit in school, 5% of the world uses Fahrenheit, the rest Celsius, almost the same for gallons and miles per hour. Ever thought of feeling lonely?

By the way, I agree that piping dimensions probably never will change. There is simply too much money invested. But it doesn't mean that nots and bolts can't. We should all at least be willing to try to standardise.


Mikey

 

Since America seems to like the imperial and dislike the decimal measurement system so much, why not have it all, 1 dollar = 20 dimes = 240 cents. Let’s see, that would make 1 nickel = 0.020833333333333333333333333333333 dollars. Na, you can have it.

 

I always thought to be consistent, there should be 12 pennies in a dime and three dimes in a quarter and four quarters of course in the dollar. Then the nickel would be 6/144 ths of a dollar.

Na, it would never work. It is too simple.

RWL

 

OK, I admit, I can’t do it – And why on earth make life more difficult than it has to be, isn’t it difficult enough as it is? But I want to know, why then do I want to know??? Well, I just want to know, that’s it. Long Live Complicity.

I have no idea how to divide in foot and inches anyone wants to give me a quick lesson?

Mikey

 

I have two hands with ten fingers. I think i can count in metric better. Otherwise i will have to find the 12's and the 16's.

Rx

 

If designers have a clue about materials and construction methods it makes no difference what system is used.

You can't just convert the numbers.

Designers are often clueless, they just look dumber when they send a blueprint to the shop that's been converted from Imperial to metric.

I'm a rigger. I work in 1/32's for wire diameter and 1/8's for lengths. 1 1/2" to 1' scale prints are easy to work in 1/8's.

I love it when I get handed an order for 1/16" 7x19 wire with swagged fittings that needs to be 3048mm +6 -0 (That's 10 feet). I can stretch 1/16 7x19 more than 6mm in 10 feet by hand. If the designer had a clue about the properties of the material, they wouldn't send such crap out of their office. So I ask, "3048mm under what tension?" , they respond "What?" :?: I build it within 1/8" of 10 feet.

I do understand that many people find the metric system easier to work with, I have a sign that reads "5/4ths people can't do fractions". I'm sure that 17/15th's of those are the ones that prefer metric.

 

I always found imperial to be a bit goofy (even though I've resigned myself to using it all the time). I mean, my god, a Pound mass equals a Pound force, even though a pound mass times 32.2Ft/s^2 equals 32.2 Lbs-Ft/s^2 (or Poundals, if you prefer).....it just annoys me.

It annoyed so much of us in college that we unanimously voted to "switch off" imperial units. That's right. Just throw the switch and shut them off permanently.

Now I see people specifying absurd things like Kilograms-force and I know that its you imperial-ists who are to blame!!!! Bah! I'm not going to waste the time ranting about how lumber is measured.

Metric has fewer unit-conversion factors and coefficient-multipliers as you move from mass to acceleration to energy and back again. Me Like!!!

 

LOL ... until we have metric time we are still stuck with at least one unwieldy system. Km/Hour to M/S springs to mind. Not as bad as MPH to FPS I'll grant but still a hassle.

 

I picked 1 --40 years ago. Did no good.

 

I agree with you,

I am often working with plans in BOTH metric and Imperial system.

I have come to choose that metric system is good for measurement but when quoting the material, you should quote the specific material size. If the supplier only had an imperial designation for the material, it should be quoted in imperial.

For example, a few years back, I recieved bid plans for a 200' smoke stack, the plans were in metric. Here iin Canada, it is very difficult to get metric plate thickness unless you think that 6.35mm amd 12.7mm are metric measurement. The weight difference of using the next imperial plate thickness was 4000 pounds.

Another issue, while working on the repair of an Icebreaker, I got into an argument with the inspector because I wanted to use 5/16 plate for a structure that calls for 8m plates. 5/16 equals to 7.9375mm. The next thickness is 3/8" or 9.525mm. It is not so much the weight but all of the structural connection had to be modified after the substitution.

I always try to do my plans in metric but I will always quote the specific material dimension

 

metric

I grew up metric. Then I started building boats in the US. Now all I can picture is imperial. But metric is so easy for almost everything. There are several free converter programs available on the web that convert any unit you can imagine to any other. I tried to attach one but its not a valid file.

 

If you think in pounds and miles instead of kilograms and kilometers, you're in the minority. Only the United States, Liberia, and Burma still primarily use English units -- the rest of the world is metric. And now the Moon will be metric too.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2007/08jan_metricmoon.htm?list54216