Bill Schwab wrote:

Wayne Lundberg wrote:

Does anybody know if Machinery's Handbook is in process of being
translated
for metrics?

I hope not, but just curious to know what is happening at the shop level
regarding the elitist's quest for world dominion through centimeters and
ergs.


Beats me. I could be wrong, but I suspect there is too much WW-II
surplus tooling in use for it to change any time soon.

I will admit that for thermal units, metric is wonderful (slugs per
cubic inch per fort night squared is a little muchg), but for pretty
much everything else mechanical, pounds and inches are hard to beat IMHO.

My experience in being in a number of machine shops at national labs
(which would seem to be a place metrication would start from) is
that few have left the imperial inch behind. The ONLY shop I have
ever been in, in the US, that used the metric system to a large extent
is the NIST shops. They DO have some WW-II vintage machines left,
and other machines that are natively imperial, but with the CNC
option to program in mm, or a DRO on a manual machine, they do it
in metric just fine.

A number of other shops take all drawings in mm, and convert every dimension
by hand to inch measure, and machine from that. Ugh - lots of room for
error in that approach.

Jon