Quote:
Originally Posted by CDSmith
Ug was a quasi-socialist with heavy liberal leanings. He was also a non-conformist, choosing not to follow the crowd by living in a cave, thus even his lean-to had liberal leanings. His "stone weight system" proposal was turned down by the counsel 13 times before being accepted.
You know, most people probably aren't going to fully understand the implication of what you were saying earlier. You might want to expound a bit on the obvious benefits to American industry by leveling the playing field with a uniform metric system in place.
I was in jr high back in the mid 70's and was thus right in that zone where we had learned the imperial system up until that point, then had to start learning the metric system. Of course all of us kids moaned and bitched loudly about it, but after being taught it for a time every one of us came to realize just how much simpler and organized it was. I still do the conversions in my head from celsius to F and kilos to pounds, mostly out of habit but the fact is I understand both. I don't need to have something converted to lbs etc in order to understand it, unlike many elderly Canadians who've not bothered to learn the new system.
We did it, and lived. Canada joined the rest of the world around 1975-76, and we're still here. The US can survive it too.
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I can expand. Prior to the metric system making it to the shores of America, manufacturing already had 2 different systems of measurement. fractions and decimals. What was meant to happen was that as machine tools became more accurate so would the units of measurement.
Of course that didn't happen so it blended. For instance. Weldments are traditionally dimensioned in fractions. Machined parts in decimals. Where it gets tricky is when a weldment has a number of different machined components integrated. Even today we work off drawings(cad files) that have dimensions like 36" +-1/64" and 1.250 +-.005. with the metric conversions in [brackets].
Now factor in that all these dimensions were actually created in metrics. What happens is that you end up with a lot of goofy numbers. I like the metric system. But in manufacturing I prefer decimal dimensioning. Engineers are trained to work in metrics, but most that I know don't naturally visualize one mm...but they can visualize 39 one thousandths of an inch.