But then you’ve got a space that’s 5’ 7 3/8" and you need a clearance of 7/32" on each end, so your piece should be…uh… 5’ 6 15/16" long. So much easier than metric, right?
In metric it would be 1711mm (or 1.711m) and you’d need to take 5.5mm off each end, so it’s 1700mm. (For the record, I picked random numbers in imperial and only did the metric conversion afterwards, I just lucked into the nice round number here.)
I dunno. You need how many sig figs you need in whichever system, but switching between a factor of 12 for the feet, base 10 for the inches, and the equivalent of binary decimals for the partial inches sure does take getting used to. I’ve finally gotten used to it enough that I can do it in my head, but I prefer to work on metric for most things.
I acknowledge that machinists just use thousandths of an inch, which does greatly improve working with that system, but it also introduces a third kind of measurement that can’t easily be interconverted with the other two. I dunno. It just feels like we’re doing way too much work propping up this archaic system when literally everyone else in the world is using something simpler and we could just be on the same system.
But then you’ve got a space that’s 5’ 7 3/8" and you need a clearance of 7/32" on each end, so your piece should be…uh… 5’ 6 15/16" long. So much easier than metric, right?
In metric it would be 1711mm (or 1.711m) and you’d need to take 5.5mm off each end, so it’s 1700mm. (For the record, I picked random numbers in imperial and only did the metric conversion afterwards, I just lucked into the nice round number here.)
I dunno. You need how many sig figs you need in whichever system, but switching between a factor of 12 for the feet, base 10 for the inches, and the equivalent of binary decimals for the partial inches sure does take getting used to. I’ve finally gotten used to it enough that I can do it in my head, but I prefer to work on metric for most things.
I acknowledge that machinists just use thousandths of an inch, which does greatly improve working with that system, but it also introduces a third kind of measurement that can’t easily be interconverted with the other two. I dunno. It just feels like we’re doing way too much work propping up this archaic system when literally everyone else in the world is using something simpler and we could just be on the same system.