"Keith W" wrote in message
...
..
As an aside, back in the days when we were switching from real
measurements to the new fangled metric stuff, I was told by a guy who
worked for Ford in Dagenham that they had spent many hours sorting out a
door problem. Apparently a large number of Cortina bodies were shipped
over from Belgium but the doors for them were built in England. The
hinge mounting points on the bodies had been built to the metric
measurements but the doors had used imperial. Needless to say they
didn't match and much modification was needed. I can't vouch for the
truth of this but it sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would
happen (like when they had to lower the track throughout the length of the
Piccadilly line tunnels because the new trains, purpose built, were too
tall).

I had a similar experience when I took over the manufacture of a medical
device. The original manufacturers were getting out of soft metal products,
but the NHS still needed the product. As we were well known to the
manufacturer, they asked us to take it over. We got a complete set of
carefully prepared metric drawings. However, if you actually made it to
those drawings, the product did not work. I knew the product had first been
made in the 1950s, so would have been designed in Imperial measure. Once I
had converted things like 'hole 16mm dia fit H8' to 'drill through with 5/8"
drill', it worked. When I spoke to the blokes on the workshop floor, they
said they had never used the metric drawings and simply worked from jigs and
memory.

Colin Bignell