Rules on pre-drilling sizes for screws

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Thomas G. Marshall said something like:

...[rip]...

....oops. should be "before I figured out why *not* ."

[Thomas G. Marshall]

LRod said something like:

...[rip]...

intermediate widths.

Makes more sense than things like 37/256th 's. Unless they are primarily metric.

...[rip]...

[Stephen M]

Yeah, I do that too, plus a little trial and error.

I think the answer is that it depends on the wood, and to some degree on the position of the screw.

IME, I seldom need to predrill at all in softwoods. If I am close to the end of the board, where splitting is more likely, I will predrill more often and more agressively.

However, I have found reclaimed very old (soft) wood to be brittle and absotutely required predrilling.

IME, the harder the wood, and the larger the screw, the more particular you should be about pilot hole size.

Cheers,

Steve

[Stephen M]

The metric debate got me thinking:

Since all the common denomenators for franctional inches are powers of 2, wouldn't it be much less cumbersome to express the demomenator as the exponent of the power of 2?

That is:

1/2 = 1/(2^1) could be expressed as 1:1 or "one, one" 3/4 = 3/(2^2) or "three, two" 3/16 would be "three, four" 37/256 would be "thiry seven, eight"

But then again I'm comfortable in hexidecimal.

-Steve

[Doug Miller]

"Less cumbersome"?? Not in my opinion.

So am I (first job out of college was assembly-language programming on a

370/145 DOS/VSE) -- but I still think that's a really bad idea, starting with the fact that while you and I are perfectly comfortable doing math in hex, it appears you've forgotten that somewhere around 99.99% of the population isn't.

BTW, it's spelled "hexadecimal."

[Stephen M]

"seven thirty seconds" is preferable to "seven five"?

I'm not really serious that it's a viable nomenclature, it just seems that there 's a while lot of chaff in the current system.

VAX assembler & BLISS

Point taken.

Really only 10 types though, those that understand binary and...

I bet we could get the whole scentific notation crowd on board for another .001%

Please note that I did not suggest that 1/32 be represented as 1/20

Cheers,

Steve

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Stephen M said something like:

Ah....a DEC old-timer.

I actually was a programmer for DEC in high school cira 1981. My junior year, working in the hiighly coveted "BASIC and RTL" department up in MK2 in Merrimack, NH.

Big time hooey, because for some reason, BASIC ruled the roost up there. Bliss was what everything serious was written in and was a very cool idea. Sitting approximately 2 inches (5.08 cm :) ) above assembly language it was a pretty nifty portable solution, particularly at the time. At least IMHO.

I wonder if I could write a "JBliss" compiler (to java VM code) ?

Maybe when my table project is done...

PS. Ever do mental arithmetic to compare the old DECsystem 10's to, say, a Dell 3 Ghz desktop? LOL...

...[john jacob jingleheimer snip]...

[Thomas G. Marshall]

.015 %? You mean .00015 times (or 1/6666th of) the diameter larger? :) Yikes!

[Doug Miller]

Yep. Much more easily understood. Even by the geeks.

[Stephen M]

Ouch...I'm only 43!

[alexy]

Well, the percent sign after the ".015" got clipped (if it was ever there) in your quoted text. In its absence, I would assume .015 times, unless I wanted to be reasonable, in which case I would recognize that he likely meant .015" or 1/64".

[Larry Blanchard]

hex, octal, bi-quinary, excess3, and so on. Who cares.

We could simplify the whole mess by referring to everything in 32nds or

64ths. Using 32nds, 1/2 could then be 16/, 1/4 would be 8/, and so on.

But if the US wouldn't adopt a system as simple as metric, my somewhat tongue-in-cheek idea doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell :-).

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Stephen M said something like:

I'm 42. I win :)

[dpb]

Kids! :(

Philco 2000 Assembly/FORTRAN IV... :)

--

[John]

[MB]

Started with PDP-11/C. Vax was a major step up. BTW, I've moved on to unix and now to windoze and still maintain that vax/vms was a great OS

- close to crash proof. It still amazes me that after twenty years, windows is still lacking features present in vax/vms...

Mitch

[J. Clarke]

I'm curious as to what those features are.

[Lew Hodgett]

Why should that surprise you?

In this digital age, try to find people who understand the analog world.

Lew

[Puckdropper]

"Lew Hodgett" wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Analog world? That's like 2^128 precision, isn't it?

Puckdropper

[Lew Hodgett]

Try to find designers of analog inputs for high speed digital data acquisition systems sometime.

Hasn't been taught at the collegiate level for probably 25-30 years.

Lew