On Thu, 21 Apr 2005 08:16:02 -0400, "J. Clarke"
wrote:

Prometheus wrote:

On Wed, 20 Apr 2005 08:42:32 -0500, Duane Bozarth
wrote:

foggytown wrote:

Making a nice but not fancy small round dining table. Time to cut the
legs. Says Norm, "We want the legs to be 28 3/4 inches." What? It
would betray his carpenterial integrity to round it off to 29"?
Someone is going to sit down at it someday and embarass him by
observing that the table seems to be about 1/4" high?

Sheesh!

Talk about pita and "Sheesh!"!

What the heck difference is it measuring 28-3/4 vs 29? A measurement is
a measurement, whatever it is...and, if the desired height of the table
is 29-1/2, which is pretty typical, then if the top is 3/4, then figure
out how long the legs need to be...

I see your point, but a measurement is not always just a measurement-
the spec sheets I get at work from the engineering dept. are usually
fairly straight-forward, 29.375" and the like, but every once in a
while I get some oddball dimension like 9.007" Ever try to measure
.007" with a tape measure? I like to nail all my parts dead on, but I
don't care to make any bets on the accuracy of a cut measured in
1/128ths of an inch- I just round 'em down to the nearest sane
fraction.

You should call the engineers and find out just what's going on. Do they
give you a tolerance? If they're giving you dimensions and tolerances that
are beyond the precision limits of your tools then they need to be made
aware of those limits and either design to them or get you more precise
tools.

Yeah, I've got a tolerance of a sixteenth of an inch, so it's really
not an issue (the parts are getting welded anyhow, and tiny gaps can
be filled in easily enough). They just come up with goofy
measurements sometimes because they calculate all the lengths off the
one critical dimention, and then let autocad do the trig for the other
dimentions. I was just pointing out that a dimention is not always
sensible.

Aut inveniam viam aut faciam