Comment on Everyday, as an American
Liz@midwest.social 4 weeks ago1/16 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 4 weeks 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.
Liz@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
Sure, but your measuring system dictates what lengths you actually design things to be. You would never actually use 0.6875, but if some jerk designed something with that length, it will be easy to tell exactly how big it was. If you switched to metric, your smallest practical unit for woodworking would almost certainly be a millimeter.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 4 weeks ago
The problem is everything is already built using the imperial measurements. Even if we switched all the new tools and materials over to metric we’d be stuck having to do a bunch of conversions when we’re integrating it into existing construction and we’d probably be dealing with that for the rest of our lives.
Liz@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
You’re already dealing with it there’s loads of stuff that’s built in metric, especially everything that’s imported. The question is if you want to continue using a system that invites mistakes in order to avoid the pain of switching. The pain will subside pretty quickly, and only come up every time you have to retrofit old construction and whatnot. As the years go on more and more things will be switched until it’s rare to see imperial. I lived in a house built in the 1800s, but we still had modern windows and insulation because those things are obviously better and we improved the building when it was convenient and necessary to do so.