In the spirit of rapprochement with Europe and reorientation away from the United States, it’s time to complete the Metrication process in Canada that was stopped prematurely by the Mulroney government.
In the spirit of rapprochement with Europe and reorientation away from the United States, it’s time to complete the Metrication process in Canada that was stopped prematurely by the Mulroney government.
After using bananas as a form of measurement, I don’t think you need to clarify that you’re from the USA.
You guys have used football fields, washing machines, and bicycles as units of measurement haha
I find the whole imperial/metric thing funny.
Like hell, even here in the USA, it’s always the 10 millimeter socket (or in my case the 15 millimeter socket) that somehow disappears.
A pendulum of one meter length swings at a rate of once per second.
Where things get weird in the USA is one mile = 5280 feet. Like, who the fuck pulled that number out of their ass?
The romans divided the mile into 5,000 feet. But the British perfered using ‘furlong’, thus the mile became 8 furlongs, and a furlong is 660 feet.
Time for a historical metrology search!
That’s the imperial system for ya. Imagine using a dude’s feet as a form of measurement. That’s weirder than having it be your fetish
Even weirder when that foot was defined based on the body of a former king of England. But, centuries later, the country that formed in a rebellion against England still keeps using that measurement, whereas England has made a lot more progress going metric.
It wasn’t so weird back when people lived in relative isolation without any kind of standards, and had to come up with some sort of reference that was widely familiar and commonly available.
You know, back in the Neolithic Age.
It even makes sense why that familiar set of references would get standardized and then survive up until the beginning of the Industrial Age. Beyond that point it’s all driven by American exceptionalism, a.k.a. willful ignorance. What I don’t understand is what happened to the cubit. Feet make sense for distance, but as a craftsman I don’t want to be foot-fondling my work pieces.
Huh, that’s interesting. Of all things to choose metric, why sockets?
I think the only thing where imperial is common here in (continental) Europe is screen sizes, which you always see in inches, and it’s weird because people have absolutely no feel for how long 55" or whatever is. The other is pipes, though in plumbing is usual to have the equivalent in mm.
The auto industry, mostly. Asian and European cars are metric, and imported into America in large numbers, and even domestic manufacturers have been going to metric fasteners in a lot of cases. The oil drain plug on my S10 is 14mm, for example.
I bet if you took a look at common lumber sizes you’d see they’re given in millimeters, but weird millimeters. Like why 19mm instead of 20? Because 19mm is very close to 3/4".
I’m not sure about the rest of the world, but automotive wheel and tire sizes in the US are my second favorite mixed measurement. A tire’s size is given in rim width in millimeters bead to bead, sidewall height as a percentage of said width, and rim diameter in inches. A 275/75R-15 fits a 275mm wide, 15 inch diameter wheel and is 206.25mm tall bead to tread.
Here in the us, sockets come in both imperial and metric. Foreign products are made with metric bolts, but some domestic made or designed stuff will use imperial. Working on things like cars is real fun because both standards are used on the same vehicle.
Yep, pretty much.
When I’m working on vehicles or bicycles, it’s almost always metric wrenches and sockets, until that one random bolt or nut that’s for whatever dumb reason in imperial, like the random 1/2", or the fairly universal 5/8" spark plug socket.
Why? Hell if I know, but some of those things probably track all the way back to Henry Ford, and possibly even before him.
In many cases like that, where an otherwise metric apparatus has an inexplicable SAE component, it’s because that component became a commodity part in Britain or America before the rest of the world industrialized.
Give an example made in Austria: Rotax 9-series aircraft engines are metric, they’re held together with metric fasteners, cylinder bores are given in millimeters, etc. It was designed in metric. The prop flange is designed to take three different bolt patterns, 75mm, 80mm, and 4 inch. Because a lot of Rotax engines were going to be sold in America, the land of McCauley, Sensenich and Hartzel. We’ve been tooled up for 4 inch prop flanges for a century now.
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