0T: metric conversion

Jun 07, 2008 71 Replies

If you're describing a chest of drawers as H90 x W100 x D49 it should be pretty obvious how big it is. In the overall scheme of things missing off the "cm" is a pretty small problem.

Commendable, but for furniture sales, to the nearest mm is overkill, fractions of a mm more so.

Agreed, that could be a problem, the combination of no units and no common sense.

Digital dyslexia?

175.0 and 170.5 would have the same issue as 1750 and 1705.

Anyway, measure twice, cut once applies...

Agreed, and then there's the implied accuracy. "About 18 inches" and "About 457mm" have different meanings to me. One I can cut quickly without careful marking-out and the other needs a scribed line and cutting on the waste side of it. I was taught to display enough figures to define the implied accuracy required of the measurement. Putting everything in mm implies working to about plus or minus 1/32" to me :-)

One day, we'll get rid of our silly metric equivalents and speak of "About 450mm" as done in metric countries (or better - half a meter). Why do we have to have stock timber lengths in mm rather than meters??? Even by eye, I can see they are all different lengths, when measured to mm accuracy...

Why bother? Easier to simply use metres with a decimal point - ie 2.35 or whatever. Centimetres just confuse. But I know why they are attractive. The inch was chosen as it is approximately the length of the top part of the thumb. (Rule of thumb). So instinctively some go for a metric measure that they can visualise. And that certainly isn't the mm. With the metre being too large.

That's true, although generally applies to decimal places.

I haven't used the deprecated imperial units for many years.

The correct way, in any system of measurement would be to quote a tolerance with the measurement - e.g. thickness of 25mm +/- 0.2 and so on

Because we still haven't truly abandoned the shackles of the past and moved into the brave new world of metric.

If we had done so, then sheet materials would be supplied as 2500 x

1250 rather than 2440 x 1220. Pots of jam would all be in 500g sizes rather than 454g and so on.

The metrication fascist's mask slips and we see what is beneath. The bureaucrat. "Rules is rules". Never mind what *you* want, the rules are there to be obeyed.

There are enough mistakes made through the wrong interpretation of measurements without introducing more. What you use within your own house etc of course doesn't matter.

But we could have had the fun of the Revolutionary Calendar....

Today is the 10th of Prairial; aka Fourche.

Weeks consist of ten days so that more can be done in the working week and every 10th day is named after a tool. This was before bricolage places were closed on Sundays.

And I for one would appreciate ceiling heights being raised by the 60mm (or so) that is implied in using full, uncut sheets of the larger size. Ceteris paribus.

So you have never ended up on a site thinking "That will just fit nicely". And then found it was a doll's house site? :-)

Whoa don't go there! No.1 Daughter is decorating the dolls house I built. There is amazing confusion, they'll have a moulded plastic sheet of 150mm tiles say 15 tiles wide and 20 long, the actual sheet is smaller than A3. Yes it's all in the 1/12th scaling but refering to something with the same number and units as the real thing really does boggle the mind, They sometimes use real world size measurements and units but as the size of scale objects so the tiles above would be refered to as 12.5mm... ARGH!

The message from Mike Barnes contains these words:

According to my reference book the details of SI metric were agreed at an international conference in 1960 and adopted by the ISO (International Standards Organisation) and the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission).

In which case the user should specify what they are. No matter what kind of units they are. Numbers are dimensionless.

And the answer to the second question?

See all the bother caused by this 'metric' system?

Should stick to good old feet and inches - you know it makes sense.

:-)

The message from Huge contains these words:

Is probably irrelevant. It would help the manufacturers however if they sang from the same hymn sheet as their suppliers, and the common hymn sheet, for better or worse, is ISO metric.

But what would become of th 440ml can of beer?

You'd drink it like you always do....

Unless your suppliers are in the USA ...

That most tape measures seem to be marked in cm might also have something to do with it.

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