Slowhand wrote:
3.28084 feet per meter? When I was 15, dad was a partner with another
contractor on a dam in Oklahoma. It was also the first federal job that
President Reagan had decided to make a metric job to get everyone used to
the forthcoming transition g.
Hummm, still in the dark ages then ;-)
And American companies wonder why selling high tech gear to the rest of
the world is so hard....
Niel.
Below is from my alter self:
http://www.ihs.com/engineering/ihs-i.../200108/3.html
"GO METRICS - Not Adopting is Lliving in the Past
from Niel J.P.Fagan, Lab. and Process Superintendent, England
John P. Schweisthal hit that nail squarely on the head, but in England
we have it even worse with Metric, English Imperial and american english
to contend with.
We buy units from Asia and its metric, from Europe metric again, from
USA a horrible mixture some (few) metric but mainly weird sizes that
make little sense like #8/32 threads. Yes we still have some older kit
with BSF/BSW, but atleast they make some sense and you can still get
most sizes of nuts and bolts off the shelf, unlike most US threads.
Yes we English have gone metric, for MOST things, and its much much
easier to build systems as a result, we still retain BSP (our imperial
pipe thread standard) which has been adopted by most of the rest of the
world and it now has an ISO designation too.
We understand that the USA likes to do things differently, BUT using
non-standard thread systems and the measurement systems that go with
them (or is that the other way round) is just living in the past, as
with most industries here its modernize or die, or atleast get stuck in
an unfavourable trading position time-warp.
I was trained when inches were king, moved through the transition, and
apart from historic equipment (and vehicles, a 1950's Land- Rover being
my preferred mode of transport, for ecological reasons as much as
anything else) most everything is now metric, and fits first time
without wasteful and sometime dangerous adaptors made by unskilled
workers "just to make it fit", re-building is an off the shelf prospect
with standard parts and no problems with odd threads etc.
Move on, don't live in the past, the future is out there, grasp it with
both hands, sure it'll hurt for a while, but change always does, and go
for it, the old'uns will complain, but working in metric is easier, base
10 calc is quicker, and in 15-20 years you may have even have caught-up
with the rest of the world!"