Comment on Everyday, as an American
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 6 months agoI also find inches easier to work with unless I’m making something with my 3d printer. Fractions are just easier when you’re making something big with looser tolerances.
Comment on Everyday, as an American
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 6 months agoI also find inches easier to work with unless I’m making something with my 3d printer. Fractions are just easier when you’re making something big with looser tolerances.
ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world 6 months ago
3 2/10 cm is easier than 3.2cm?
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 6 months ago
Doing things in 1/16ths of an inch is easier than metric for like woodworking and such IMO. Until you get into stuff that has tighter tolerances than 1/16th of an inch. Even then you could go to .010s or .001s of an inch but I’m more used to metric at that scale and that’s what the applications I use for 3d printing default to.
Liz@midwest.social 6 months ago
1/16 of an inch is slightly smaller than a millimeter, you’d just end up using a millimeter or half again as your tolerance limit.
The big issue with imperial is all the fractions and strange conversions. On more then one occasion I’ve caught myself mixing up eighths and quarters, because my brain views them more as concepts then as numbers. Which is bigger, 11/16 or 3/4? Now, you’ll get the answer, sure, but you had to think about it and it goes against the natural intuition that larger numbers are bigger. Compare that with, which is bigger 0.6875 or 0.75 and it should be trivial to see which is easier to learn and use.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 6 months ago
0.6875 is basically a meaningless concept to me when I try to picture it in my head and what if you need to add ot to another dimension? It’s as easy to work 4 decimal places in your head. .75 only works because I automatically convert it to 3/4. Maybe it’s just something that comes with experience but I don’t have trouble with knowing what’s what. If your not sure you can always make the denominator equal and figure it that way. 3/4=12/16 for instance. Easy math to do in your head.
ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world 6 months ago
you don’t get it.
your tools and materials will come in metric when everything is metric.
doing things on 1/10 of an inch or 1/10 of a cm is the same as 0.1 inches or 0.1 cm.
1/16 = 0.0625
3/16 of an inch = 0.1875 inches
as in “1/16th” literally means “one divided by sixteen, so do extra math instead of just giving you the real number”
decimal doesn’t mean, nor have anything to do with metric.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 6 months ago
So I have to throw out all my stuff and spend $1000s on new tools?
You don’t work in 1/10ths of an inch. It’s 1/16ths and that that’s where the math ends. You don’t need to convert it to decimal. Unless you’re doing machining which you do work in .0001ths due to the tighter tolerances and I’ve already agreed you might as well use metric for that.