Pirates! - Why the US doesn't use the metric system.

Also I'm a sailboat guy and the knot thing and nautical mile thing always trip me up . And don't even get me started on magnetic compass readings .
 
My concern... is we use one system or the other... and not mix them.

Remember a service van I had years ago...
Literally one bolt of the engine accessories (belt driven things on the front of the engine) would be 13MM... the next 1/2".

Yeah, I've been there. Due to a committee of contributors, our product had fasteners to be cataloged before
production, and (after some grousing and grumbling) mostly got sorted out. Everything was metric,
except one inserts-in-sheet-metal, so we rationalized at the toolkit. Four metric Allen wrenches, two or three
hex wrenches, and (for the lonely inch screws) Phillips head driver. The hard part was, one
or two socket heads could just barely be seen, and took a 18" (half meter) extension shaft driver
if you didn't want to skin your knuckles. Other than that, the whole multikilobuck
gizmo only needed the tools you could fit in a shirtpocket.

Three of the fasteners had to be done 'cleverly' (I hate that, SOMEONE a few years from now
won't get it right), so I felt a little ... unclean... about the design, but at least there wasn't a
wrong-measure-system wrench issue.
 
When I was teen I worked construction during the summer. This was in Scotland in the late 60's, just as they were changing to the metric system. The new system worked fine and the change was surprisingly smooth. Except for all the rules of thumb. I was frequently told to cut a piece of wood to (say) 1478mm. Less 1/4".
 
i was trained on the inch (imperial) system as a machinist in 1977-79, never learned metric, never needed it,dont see me learning it in the last half of my life either..in 1969 NASA put Neil Armstrong on the moon and brought him safely back to earth using the INCH system!!! if it was good enough f NASA and Neil Armstrong its still good enough f me !!!!!!! another story, last machine shop i worked in we had a russian lathe ,big long one 3o"x10ft because it had a power feed on the compound,it had a coolant pipe outlet on the carrige, pipe stuck up about a ft and had a swivaling extention on it so u could put coolant pouring on just the right spot where u were cutting,anyway i was cleaning the back side of lathe ,slipped and grabed coolant pipe ,it snapped in two like a twig !!! looked closer at it and it was pot metal, full of holes and air bubbles !!! anyway i removed it all and found some typical american plumbing pipe 3/4 and it threaded into the russian carrige hole like it was made for it !!! worked great, no leaks.
 
The old imperial system was based on the human body, one foot, duh. The Japanese and the Russians, even the French, had their own versions. For building furniture it's still a better system. Houses have been 16" OC for almost 200 years. For machinery, it's silly. Say the shaft is 80mm ,a pretty standard machine size, so I can grab a bearing just using the bearing's last two numbers and the type. Machinery is international . If a machinist makes a new shaft, instead of simple 80mm, he has to convert it to ????. . Now don't tell me that's not silly.
 
all that and yet with our out dated system we saved the world twice and put a man on the moon twice.
 
When my son was going through his apprenticeship he had to study the whole metric thing, that included learning to read a metric micrometer, only problem was there wasn't a metric mic anywhere on the plant site so he could practice:)
 
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