TheWiggman
Haters' gonna hate
I'm going back to measuring systems, rant time.
Being born in '82 I only - ONLY - used the metric system at school. Not once did we need to convert. On to uni, and again we were taught everything in SI and Amy have had to convert once or twice, but all textbooks were selected because they were in SI units. Anyway, in the real world this isn't an issue because I just multiply by 25.4 and life is sweet. Pressures are irritating because a lot of blokes deal in psi, so I multiply by 7 for a rough estimate and divide by 0.75 when chaps talk in HP. I ALWAYS provide advice or figures in SI units and if they want it in imperial, I ask them to convert. The world uses kPa, learn what it means just like I've had to learn to deal with people giving me numbers in psi. Doesn't always make me popular but stiff shit.
Yesterday a rep comes on site and we're taking some clearance measurements on something. I ask him the tolerances and he says 0.10-0.12, sweet as. The fitter on hand gives me his feeler gauges which are imperial. Each gauge is in steps of thou with mm displayed (0.004, 0.005 etc with 0.127 next to it). Fantastic. Anyway this puts both these blokes in imperial mode which becomes a bit of a mess. "Between 4 and 5 thou" he says, so I go along with it and find out it's ok. I'm thinking "between 0.102 and 0.127". We find another measurement was out of spec. So I remember all these figures and write them down, then discuss matters later on.
I state that something was well outside tolerances and he says no, only just. I then ask to refer to the manual and there are two tables - imperial and metric. He was quoting the imperial tables but the item is actually designed in SI, so the imperial table is written to three decimal places. The SI table however, had nice even numbers. So what he said was 2 thou was actually 2.362 thou in the table, vs 0.06mm. This meant that even thou 2 thou barely fit he was claiming that as the required clearance was slightly larger, it was probably ok. You can imagine this became as confusing as shit because he was now converting conversions of estimates and seeing as the item was reassembled, making sense of it was a bit of a nightmare.
One simple example, but a shining one of why I push to use only one system.
Being born in '82 I only - ONLY - used the metric system at school. Not once did we need to convert. On to uni, and again we were taught everything in SI and Amy have had to convert once or twice, but all textbooks were selected because they were in SI units. Anyway, in the real world this isn't an issue because I just multiply by 25.4 and life is sweet. Pressures are irritating because a lot of blokes deal in psi, so I multiply by 7 for a rough estimate and divide by 0.75 when chaps talk in HP. I ALWAYS provide advice or figures in SI units and if they want it in imperial, I ask them to convert. The world uses kPa, learn what it means just like I've had to learn to deal with people giving me numbers in psi. Doesn't always make me popular but stiff shit.
Yesterday a rep comes on site and we're taking some clearance measurements on something. I ask him the tolerances and he says 0.10-0.12, sweet as. The fitter on hand gives me his feeler gauges which are imperial. Each gauge is in steps of thou with mm displayed (0.004, 0.005 etc with 0.127 next to it). Fantastic. Anyway this puts both these blokes in imperial mode which becomes a bit of a mess. "Between 4 and 5 thou" he says, so I go along with it and find out it's ok. I'm thinking "between 0.102 and 0.127". We find another measurement was out of spec. So I remember all these figures and write them down, then discuss matters later on.
I state that something was well outside tolerances and he says no, only just. I then ask to refer to the manual and there are two tables - imperial and metric. He was quoting the imperial tables but the item is actually designed in SI, so the imperial table is written to three decimal places. The SI table however, had nice even numbers. So what he said was 2 thou was actually 2.362 thou in the table, vs 0.06mm. This meant that even thou 2 thou barely fit he was claiming that as the required clearance was slightly larger, it was probably ok. You can imagine this became as confusing as shit because he was now converting conversions of estimates and seeing as the item was reassembled, making sense of it was a bit of a nightmare.
One simple example, but a shining one of why I push to use only one system.
