Metric or Imperial? Or both?

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Location
Loch side.
Posted this before, but the one on the left is a Metric 250mm adjustable & the one of the right is a 10" Imperial you can see it is forged on them (if you zoom in)

View attachment 472511

It is good to know that the Irish vernier caliper is available in metric too.
 

Brains

Legendary Member
Location
Greenwich
Those German rocket engineers were pretty smart converting everything to feet and pounds for local needs

Space ships, being aircraft, means that speed is measured in knots and distance is measured in nautical miles!

If you look at film of the Apollo missions, distance from Earth is always given in nautical miles.
 

MontyVeda

a short-tempered ill-controlled small-minded troll
Both here too, far easier to say it's an 8' x 4' sheet than a 1220 x 2440 but then no-one says 3/8th" ply it's always 10mil
this... imperial above half an inch, metric below.

I also have a habit of mixing the two... I'm looking for a bit of wood to put in my hearth that needs to be about 120cm long and about 14" wide
 

Chris S

Legendary Member
Location
Birmingham
The metric system was just coming in when I was at primary school in the early 1970s. I was taught feet and inches for lengths but by the time we were taught weights they had moved over to kilograms.

I still think that way today. Whenever I see something in centimetres or millimetres I have to convert it to inches before I can visualize it.
 

mustang1

Legendary Member
Location
London, UK
When looking at how far to ride, I use miles because the number is smaller and hence more do-able.

After the ride, I use KMs because the number seems more impressive.

I can happily convert between common imperial and metric scales.
 

KneesUp

Guru
The metric system was just coming in when I was at primary school in the early 1970s. I was taught feet and inches for lengths but by the time we were taught weights they had moved over to kilograms.

I still think that way today. Whenever I see something in centimetres or millimetres I have to convert it to inches before I can visualize it.
On a related serious note - I was taught all in metric as I am - by the sounds of it - 10 years younger than you. However, you pick stuff up, so I refer to height of people in feet and inches, and obviously distance and speed in miles and miles per hour. I've never done weight in stones, although a lot of people my age do, OH included. Any and all use of imperial measurements annoys the kid no end, although she generally accepts miles and mph.

We should really make an effort to change properly.
 
D

Deleted member 26715

Guest
We should really make an effort to change properly.
With a risk of somebody mentioning the B word & getting this moved to the dark place, I feel that that is part of the issue, we should have either gone over or dug our heels in & said No, personally I don't care either way, but we should only have 1 national system
 

Profpointy

Legendary Member
Scientists use all sorts of hodge podge units. Both energy and mass in electron volts, rather than Joules or kilograms. And astronomers quote distances in parsecs not metres and then have Hubble's constant (rate of expansion of the universe) in km per sec per mega parsec - yet the SI units should be Hertz.
 
With a risk of somebody mentioning the B word & getting this moved to the dark place, I feel that that is part of the issue, we should have either gone over or dug our heels in & said No, personally I don't care either way, but we should only have 1 national system

All the German states used to have their own version of a foot, and then to confuse matters even more, the Prussian states standardised their own system so Hohenzollern, in the south, has the same system as the north but different from their neighbours east and west.

It was probably quite a relief when Napoleon came along and told them all to use metric.
 
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