Author Topic: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)  (Read 13978 times)

Offline NeoTech

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*lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« on: November 29, 2013, 10:07:18 AM »
Dear god.. this made me laugh so hard i snorted coffe out of my nose.. How the hell have you brits and yanks ever got anything done properly ever. =D



And btw, this explains why american cars are nice too look at but is a hassle to repair cuz nothing fits as intended.. *Yes im in a glass house breaking mood* ;D
Machinery: Optimum D320x920, Optimum BF20L, Aciera F3. -- I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. http://www.roughedge.se/blogg/

Offline awemawson

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #1 on: November 29, 2013, 10:17:49 AM »
Inifinately better than a system based on an erroneous estimate of the length of the equator  by a silly little dictator in a funny hat :ddb:

I find it very convenient that my shod foot is exactly 12" so can 'step measure' things easily.

If it cheers you up, I am now largely metric in the workshop. (But still think in thous for tiny cutting increments !)

Andrew

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Offline 75Plus

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #2 on: November 29, 2013, 10:34:35 AM »
Using the Imperial system America has put men on the moon and returned them safely 6 times. Haven't heard of any moon landings using the metric system.

I might also point out that during WWI and WWII the winners were on the Imperial system while the losers were on metrics.

This is a subject that should be closed before it escalates!!

Joe

Offline tekfab

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #3 on: November 29, 2013, 10:41:23 AM »
Using the Imperial system America has put men on the moon and returned them safely 6 times. Haven't heard of any moon landings using the metric system.

I might also point out that during WWI and WWII the winners were on the Imperial system while the losers were on metrics.

This is a subject that should be closed before it escalates!!

Joe

LOL ! You are the one who mentioned the war  :D

Offline S. Heslop

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #4 on: November 29, 2013, 11:13:14 AM »
I used to be strictly metric in the past but couldn't keep that up once I started actually doing things, so now I use both.

Recently i've even started using fractional inches for some furniture since it leads to nicer looking numbers than the horrific decimal millimeters you often end up with.

It reminds me alot of the athiesm thing where people without much contact with the real world can really get carried away.


Here's a related youtube.

Offline geoff_p

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #5 on: November 29, 2013, 11:30:35 AM »
When I worked in Taiwan, I bought a steel rule - it was marked out to 305mm on one edge and TEN 'U-flung-whatsits' on the other, so 1 'U-flung-whatsit' was equal to 30.5mm or 1.2 inches.  Nobody could tell me what was the purpose.

I used to buy a couple of kilos of meat at the market, but checking it before cooking it was way under weight - the stall-holder explained to me they have two versions of Kilogram, the Market Kilo and the international one.


Offline Lew_Merrick_PE

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #6 on: November 29, 2013, 12:25:30 PM »
My original trade training was making guitars & lutes.  The guitar industry in America actually came from the German States at the start of the 19th century and was intrinsically metric.  Thus, I learned the metric system long before most Americans.  My next apprenticeship was as a tool & die machinist in what was at that time the center of pulp & paper that is based on 1/256ths of an inch.  I moved into canning about the time that that industry changed to decimal inches.  This made me tri-lingual when it came to measurements.

I keep hoping that the metric system will get its act together.  In my lifetime, the basic definition of the metre has changed twice and the temperature scale changed from Centigrade to Celsius to account for errors in the placement of 0°C.  Then there are metric screwthreads that took from 1947 to 1999 to standardize such that major-diameter & pitch definitions were consistent.  I discovered this little disparity while installing radomes for NATO in 1972-73.  American (supposedly) ISO metric threads were not the same as DIN metric threads which were different from both British Standard and French ISO metric threads.  As I was being paid by the hour for this work, it was an interestingly profitable situation.

Here we are in 2013 (almost 2014) and the default tolerance & allowance on metric screwthreads still comes in: US-ISO, BS, DIN, French ISO, and JIC variations.  If I have a default male DIN thread mating to a default JIC female thread, there is a 42% chance that the two will not correctly assemble.  This example is from a 2009 analysis I did for Microsoft when they needed to apportion blame (fix the blame and then fix the problem, right?) on a production "mishap."  Thus, in multi-national manufacturing operations, every (metric) screwthread must include a non-default tolerance & allowance condition set -- which is then priced (costed) as a special thread -- if one is to actually guarantee 100% fit-up at assembly.

Yeah, tell me about it...

Offline ieezitin

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #7 on: November 29, 2013, 03:44:59 PM »
Geeees Lew.. Relating to your example on international standards, Let me enlighten you……   Its all done by design.

I designed and manufactured crimping machines for electrical leaved cores for coils for a supplier in Wales back in the eighties, I made up my own thread sizes and often reversed them, just because I wanted it harder for them or whomever to reverse engineer them alas eliminating me as a supplier, I still use this practice today.

It’s funny how a timing belt snaps at 100,000 miles on a VW Diesel engine. It’s funny why Gm, Ford and Chrysler use both thread systems on there vehicles, not forgetting every bloody torx ,slothead, Phillips, hex, 12 point, 6 point bla bla for fasteners.

Shuffling forward, imperial or Metric, it’s all maths, the power comes from going deeper past the decimal point.

Anthony.
If you cant fix it, get another hobby.

Offline doubleboost

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #8 on: November 29, 2013, 04:02:51 PM »
I was brought up with feet and inches
Having fractions and uneven numbers made you think harder
Even the money 12 pennys  to a shilling made you think
I still work in imperial most of the time
I well remember asking a young lad to cut 3/8 off the end of something (he thought I was taking the piss)
John

Offline tom osselton

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #9 on: November 29, 2013, 05:14:01 PM »
Using the Imperial system America has put men on the moon and returned them safely 6 times. Haven't heard of any moon landings using the metric system.

I might also point out that during WWI and WWII the winners were on the Imperial system while the losers were on metrics.

This is a subject that should be closed before it escalates!!

Joe
Well they did land on mar's or at least several feet below it! It seem that by farming out the jobs metric and imperial was used in the software  :zap: I belive. I was taught the Imperial way and can't really find a fault with it but they did switch to metric when I graduated  :bang: folowing the american's who aperantly switched back to imperial from what I heard was a cost of changing over to it. Canada stayed in to stay in step with the rest of the world, and as far as the other measurements there are specific to that area of industry.
  So the last thing I have to say is :
Everyone is out of step but our Tommy!   :ddb:

Offline Pete.

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #10 on: November 29, 2013, 05:20:29 PM »
I was brought up with feet and inches
Having fractions and uneven numbers made you think harder
Even the money 12 pennys  to a shilling made you think
I still work in imperial most of the time
I well remember asking a young lad to cut 3/8 off the end of something (he thought I was taking the piss)
John

John - last year I met a newly-qualified site engineer who asked for a 200mm hole to be drilled in concrete. Now diamond core bits are mostly made with imperial tubes so we still often refer to the hole sizes in inches.
I said "Just the one eight inch hole - nothing else?", and the guy looked puzzled.
The site manager burst out laughing and said to the young engineer "See I told you that you were weird", then to me he said "He doesn't know what eight inches is".
I looked the engineer up and down and said "No, I don't suppose he does"

The site manager roared with laughter again...

Offline NeoTech

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #11 on: November 29, 2013, 08:15:03 PM »
*sits in my corner snickering* that escalated quickly. Its like the old Mac vs. PC discusson. ;)

Every system of measuring has its faults. I mostly use fractions myself. Like 1 n 2/3 of a given distance.. :)

Thanks anyway for a entertaining thread. :)
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Offline Anzaniste

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #12 on: November 29, 2013, 09:23:55 PM »
It's much easier to divide by eye something into half and thus a quater, an eighth, sixteenth etc than it is to divide things by tents.
Scrooby, 1 mile south of Gods own County.

Offline philf

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #13 on: November 30, 2013, 04:52:24 AM »
Just to add my tuppence worth......

OK you can easily divide 7/8" by 2 to get 7/16" quite easily. This gets more complicated when you get to measurements like 3 17/32" (Half of which is 1 49/64" I think).

Now what happens when you want to move that distance on your lathe or mill? You have to turn the fractional measurement into a decimal number to do anything with it!

The decimal system wins!  :D

(I'm sure someone, somewhere will have a lathe or mill with fractional divisions to contradict me!)

:beer:

Phil.
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Offline Pete W.

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #14 on: November 30, 2013, 04:54:44 AM »
Hi there, all,

From where I'm looking, both Imperial and Metric systems are established enough that neither can be denied.  So, I have enough measurement equipment to do the jobs I do in whichever system is the more appropriate.

What I do find bizarre, though, is when someone tries to specify something in one system that was conceived, designed and manufactured in the other.  For instance, an eBay seller describing chunks of 3/8" tool steel as 9.5 mm (and often measuring it so coarsely that whether it's an Imperial or a Metric item is obscured!).

To quote another example - one of my hobbies is microscopy and it's regrettably common to encounter a 'definition' of the Royal Microscopical Society thread for microscope objectives expressed in millimetres, it just looks daft!  I'll concede that if you were screw-cutting that thread on a lathe with a Metric lead-screw, you'd need to have two toes of one foot standing in Metric territory but every parameter of that thread is fundamentally conceived and specified in Imperial units and I can't be comfortable with its being expressed any other way.

The most bizarre case I ever encountered was when the Technical Publications department of a certain company, off their own bat and without consulting the Engineering department, 'metricated' the handbooks for an electronic system that had been designed in Imperial units.  The text contained gems like 'carefully remove the 15.875 mm cap-head bolts ... '
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry - the blighters charged the whole fiasco to my budget!   :bang:   :bang:   :bang: 
Best regards,

Pete W.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you haven't seen the latest design change-note!

Offline SwarfnStuff

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #15 on: November 30, 2013, 05:18:24 AM »
So should I mention the disparity we have with liquid / volumetric measures? Like, one Imperial gallon being about 4.5 Litre, the US Gallon being about 4.2 Litre. Not to mention tuns, barrels. pints n stuff. OH bother this is too taxing for my  poor 72 solar orbit brain.  :hammer:  I'm gunna make swarf of indeterminate size and quantity then see what's left.  :Doh: :doh:
John B
Converting good metal into swarf sometimes ending up with something useful. ;-)

Offline mklotz

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #16 on: November 30, 2013, 11:11:46 AM »
It's much easier to divide by eye something into half and thus a quater, an eighth, sixteenth etc than it is to divide things by tents.

If powers of two are so fascinating why aren't micrometers calibrated in units of 1/1024 of an inch?
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Offline DavidA

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #17 on: November 30, 2013, 11:30:25 AM »
ieezitin.

It’s funny how a timing belt snaps at 100,000 miles on a VW Diesel engine.

Yes,  hilarious.

Thing is,  a quick search brings up the replacement periond for VW Diesel timing belts as 100,000 miles or four years.  How old is yours ?

Dave.

Offline Fergus OMore

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #18 on: November 30, 2013, 12:01:35 PM »
Just to add my tuppence worth......


(I'm sure someone, somewhere will have a lathe or mill with fractional divisions to contradict me!)

:beer:

Phil.

But 'Two Pence' worth was 1/6th of a shilling and a shilling was a 1/20th of a pound which was 16 ounces :bang: which was a 1/14th of a stone.

All this was before the pound was used to keep sick animals- I think :lol: :scratch:

Those were the ones which couldn't fly which needed rods, poles and sometimes perches which lastly swam about.

Apologies to Matt Tinker and Elgar for the Enigma Variations

Norm- who has to be three standard deviations from anywhere.


Offline ieezitin

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #19 on: November 30, 2013, 12:23:54 PM »
Dave...

my one is a 2007 Jetta....

 its been pure murder of an experience owning it. I got it two years ago when it had 86,000 on it, its very clean and ran like a champ, my main reason for getting it was it gets 50miles a gallon.

I took it back around 97,000 miles to get the oil done and have a little check up and then that's when they informed me the belt needs changing for a cost of $1200, the dealership did it and left out 3 engine mounts, so it was no surprise when the engine lurched out of the brackets and twisted forward and smashed the radiator hoses and other stuff.

After that shower of 5hite episode and breaking balls with VW i had a problem with the LED dash cluster, when the sun hits it and raises the temperature its fails and just goes blank, low and behold when i went to now a different dealership and explained what was happening he immediately roared out " Aha!!!!!! they normally go around 100,000 miles or so"  " but for a fee of $1200 we can throw a new one in" naturally i said  *****lks.

I have calculated to the penny via a spreadsheet the savings i make on fuel charges being that its a diesel i give straight back in parts that are designed to fail.


Its a shame because i drive 95 miles per day 6 days a week so the fuel consumption was a major factor in buying it, coupled with that being an ex-pat living in the USA and having driven VW cars all my life while i was at home i knew that VW is a fantastic product, changed my mind now though, There not even built in Wolfberg anymore, at least the ones in the US are not, they all come from mexico.

Now the boot gets a bit funny when trying to close it.... a little bit like the wife really.....

sorry for the rant........... didnt mean to take over the post...

Anthony.
If you cant fix it, get another hobby.

Offline AdeV

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #20 on: November 30, 2013, 01:09:27 PM »
It's much easier to divide by eye something into half and thus a quater, an eighth, sixteenth etc than it is to divide things by tents.

True, but you can't count 1/2, 1/4, 1/8ths, etc. on your fingers & toes, like you can decimals...

Obviously a bit of a nuisance if you've lost a finger or a toe along the way... there's not much call for a base-9 system.

Personally I prefer Octal, one doesn't need to use one's thumbs, and/or 2 digits spare in case of accidents :)
Cheers!
Ade.
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Occasionally: Zhengzhou, China. An even longer way from anywhere...

Offline Fergus OMore

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #21 on: November 30, 2013, 01:37:33 PM »
Oh yes, you can - do all sorts of things with fractions as music is written in staves- or wooden things surrounded by bars  but you still get a round( oops) to circles of fifths.-scores of times. Nope, I am not to blame for this, I am merely saying what is there.  I could go onto to things a Megalithic Yards-- and this is why the wagon got pointed towards  the stars and the planet Venus. It's all there- read the book!

However, this VW thing isn't a really a VW thing. One of our Mercs 'blew up'- after a lot less mileage.

The fault is that manufacturers are now 'overstressing' power units. I've just had a doze of the collywobbles because my BMW Mini Cooper is one of those whose steering is prone to locking= as it drives along.
So I've been in the market for 'another shopping trolley' and found that there is a raft of cars which will push out brake horse powers far in excess of the perhaps 35 real BHP of 55BHP of an old BMC type Mini Cooper that was shagged at 35 k miles.

I went out and had a look at these 1.4 litre thingies which would do vast speeds and vaster economies in miles per gallon or litres per 100 kilometres. Not just Panzer wagens but High and Dry's and Fords and whatever. And then I thought of the guy who said 'there is no substitute for CUBIC Inches'

I'm picking up a diesel 1.6 Skoda diesel  which is 105 brake horse power. Now possums, this little thing will go one and a half times faster than a  Ferdie Porsche Beetle-down hill and with the wind behind it.

Will it last as long? Let's get real, eh?

Offline Pete W.

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #22 on: November 30, 2013, 02:09:46 PM »

SNIP

However, this VW thing isn't a really a VW thing.

SNIP

I'm picking up a diesel 1.6 Skoda diesel  which is 105 brake horse power.

 SNIP

But, Fergus,

Isn't a Skoda a 'VW thing' nowadays?
Best regards,

Pete W.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you haven't seen the latest design change-note!

Offline DavidA

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #23 on: November 30, 2013, 02:33:33 PM »
Anthony,

...sorry for the rant........... didnt mean to take over the post....

Sounds like you are entitled to a rant or two.

Did you get fully re imbursed by the agent for the damage ?

Dave.

Offline NeoTech

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #24 on: November 30, 2013, 02:47:25 PM »
Machinery: Optimum D320x920, Optimum BF20L, Aciera F3. -- I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. http://www.roughedge.se/blogg/

Offline ieezitin

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #25 on: November 30, 2013, 04:30:21 PM »
Dave...

yes i did get made whole, they re-installed the motor and gave me a guarantee for 12,000 miles and or one year on there work and parts, of course i burned through the miles quickly.

After my experience i will never buy a VW again not because of the product but more the attitude i got from VW US and Europe.......

Neo.........Do ya wanna soda with the pop-corn?

Anthony......
If you cant fix it, get another hobby.

Offline Lew_Merrick_PE

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Re: *lmao* Imperial system.. ;)
« Reply #26 on: December 01, 2013, 10:53:42 AM »
Shuffling forward, imperial or Metric, it’s all maths, the power comes from going deeper past the decimal point.
Anthony,

It is not just math, it is design as well.  The ABC (American-British-Canadian) standards promulgated for WWI established quite a few well designed criteria.  A (now Unified National or) UN Fine thread has 15% greater tensile & shear properties than a UN Coarse thread and a UN Extra-Fine thread has 15% greater tensile & shear properties than a UN Fine thread.  That was a criteria set by the ABC Joint Industrialization Council back in 1912!

In the ISO (metric) thread system, an ISO Fine thread has a (roughly) 3% in tensile or shear properties than an ISO Standard (or Coarse) thread.  Further, an ISO Standard thread must be used with a threaded insert in low-shear materials whereas a UN Coarse thread was designed to work with low-shear materials.  The ISO system began being defined 35 years after the ABC system (which, in turn became: ASA/CSA and UN systems).

I was able to tabulate relative male- and female-thread shear areas (i.e. pull-out strengths) for every UN thread from #0 (.060 major diameter) through 1.500 inches along with a lot of other useful data in just 5 total pages.  Until the allowance & tolerances for metric threads are unified, I shan't even attempt that task.  My best estimate is that such an effort today would require more than 125 pages to tabulate.

And you do not want to get me started on that most useless of units, the Newton!