Measured in Inches...

[Nephasth]

Was helping the little girl with her math homework this evening. She had a worksheet on measuring sides of quadrangles and finding their perimeters. So we pull out her little ruler and start measuring... ---smurfing--- thing was ruled to tenths of an inch! Chinese piece of crap!

[Hoopz]

Did she learn to "carry the one" or do they call it "regrouping"?  I have a couple friends who teach elementary ed/intermediate level and I blow them grief about that term all the time.

Though a "metric" style ruler in inches is hilarious.   

[Le Chuck]

You guys haven't heard about the metric-imperial-fusion?  Inches are now measured in 10ths and 100ths.  They are all slightly longer and a foot is now half a meter and only 10 inches.  One inch is now 5cm.  A KM is still 1000m which is conversely 2000ft.  The mile is now a unit of time as is the parsec... though this was probably done to justify Han's Kessel run figures.  The new wieght conversion goes gram, ounce, kilogram, lb, stone, tonne all being factors of 10 to each other.  Finally time has been adjusted to a 10 month year of 10 hour days with 100 minutes of 100 seconds each.  You probably need a new watch also.  Man you guys are behind the power curve on this one.       

[yaksplat]

Well, there were 10 months until Julius Augustus Caesar added July and August.  It has always bothered me that the months with the prefixes sept, oct, nov and dec weren't the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months.

[Dervacumen]

I've seen those a couple times.  It make measuring easy as long as you're going it alone and don't plan on using the measurements for anything outside your little project.  Just wait till you come across a ruler that's split in to dodecameters.  Those are a pain.

[TopJimmyCooks]

Surveyors use tenths of a foot for elevations.  Grade rods have 10ths of a foot on one side and inches on the other side, typically.  Machinists use "tenths" as slang for ten-thousandths of an inch.  Just keep your daughter out of the surveyor/machinist aisle of the school store and she'll do fine. 

[Ond]

So is that a Decimal Inch (because there is such a thing)?  Where does that fit in and is it base 10? Must be if its in tenths.  A quick search reveals the Scottish Inch and the Swedish Inch .  WTF?  

[Nephasth]

I like metric as much as imperial, but this was one bastardized child of a ruler... Nothing like a ruler that states "inches", has the medium length marks for 1/2" increments, but has 10 1/8" marks per inch. Been a while since I've been led on for that long...

[SavannahLion]

Did she learn to "carry the one" or do they call it "regrouping"?  I have a couple friends who teach elementary ed/intermediate level and I blow them grief about that term all the time.

This was one of the driving forces behind why I have up teaching my stepdaughter math. I get the logic behind why they do this, but it continues to complicate things more than necessary.

[Malenko]

are you sure you weren't measuring with a scale and not a ruler?

[geomartin]

I remember the first time I saw the 10ths and 100ths scale back in the late 70s in my high school drafting class.  It has nothing to do with metric.  Once you get outside of carpentry and architectural use, it is not uncommon to have this type of scale.  Most Calipers and micrometers measure by 10s and 100s as well.

[Green Giant]

You guys haven't heard about the metric-imperial-fusion?  Inches are now measured in 10ths and 100ths.  They are all slightly longer and a foot is now half a meter and only 10 inches.  One inch is now 5cm.  A KM is still 1000m which is conversely 2000ft.  The mile is now a unit of time as is the parsec... though this was probably done to justify Han's Kessel run figures.  The new wieght conversion goes gram, ounce, kilogram, lb, stone, tonne all being factors of 10 to each other.  Finally time has been adjusted to a 10 month year of 10 hour days with 100 minutes of 100 seconds each.  You probably need a new watch also.  Man you guys are behind the power curve on this one.       

Are you trying to tell me that 8 inches will now be more like 6.5 inches?

Every guy in America is gonna have a problem with that one, well some of us guys will.

[Dervacumen]

So is that a Decimal Inch (because there is such a thing)?  Where does that fit in and is it base 10? Must be if its in tenths.  A quick search reveals the Scottish Inch and the Swedish Inch .  WTF? 

There's also Hedwig's Angry Inch.

[Nephasth]

are you sure you weren't measuring with a scale and not a ruler?

This was a 6" clear child's ruler... with snowflakes printed on it. Pretty sure it wasn't a scale, but you never know...

I remember the first time I saw the 10ths and 100ths scale back in the late 70s in my high school drafting class.  It has nothing to do with metric.  Once you get outside of carpentry and architectural use, it is not uncommon to have this type of scale.  Most Calipers and micrometers measure by 10s and 100s as well.

Calipers, especially micrometers, are typically ruled by 1/1000" increments (best for RCHs), some even in 1/10000" increments for the gnat's ass measurements. I would have no use for a set of calipers that only measured in 1/100" increments, let alone 1/10".

[Le Chuck]

Are you trying to tell me that 8 inches will now be more like 6.5 inches?

Every guy in America is gonna have a problem with that one, well some of us guys will.

Real men conduct all personal measurements in the age old standards of tuna cans and soda cans... which shall remain constant during this transition.  Less in girth than either or is not even on the scale.    

[Nephasth]

Does a Red Bull can count?

[yaksplat]

The RCH was always the measurement used in construction and all industrial piping that I've done.  It's so versatile.

[Le Chuck]

The RCH was always the measurement used in construction and all industrial piping that I've done.  It's so versatile.

We just use the CH measurement in most military ordnance work.  A fine example would be, "Did you see Top?  He was about one CH from blowing his face off just then"

I take it the R in the RCH is for red?

[Nephasth]

Red CHs are finer than their Black, Brown, or Blonde cousins, therefore more accurate when taking measurements.

[Samstag]

Red CHs are finer than their Black, Brown, or Blonde cousins, therefore more accurate when taking measurements.

I disagree.  It's too hard to see the "tenths" markings.  Blonde CHs are preferable when dealing with fractions of a CH.

[Dervacumen]

Red CHs are finer than their Black, Brown, or Blonde cousins, therefore more accurate when taking measurements.

I disagree.  It's too hard to see the "tenths" markings.  Blonde CHs are preferable when dealing with fractions of a CH.

Is blond the same thing a pure cane?

[lilshawn]

CH is an perfectly acceptable unit of measurement.

a little more than a CH

Less than a CH

half a CH

A shitload is also an acceptable unit of measurement.

[Le Chuck]

CH is an perfectly acceptable unit of measurement.

a little more than a CH

Less than a CH

half a CH

A shitload is also an acceptable unit of measurement.

True but shitloads come in metric and imperial measurements so it's still confusing.  I think there is also a sterling shitload and a troy shitload. The CH seems to be universal tho.

[Hoopz]

What about in Brazil?

[Le Chuck]

What about in Brazil?

It's by width and not length, otherwise the scale would have been drastically reduced globally since the late 70s early 80s.  I heard in Brazil you can purchase artificial equivalents since the real deal is all but unheard of. 

[MonMotha]

Decimal inches are VERY common in machining and engineering work.  I have several rulers with both decimal and fractional inches on one side then metric (decimal only, of course) on the other.

It turns out that the mil (one one-thousandth of an inch) is a rather handy unit when working on typical "miniature" things like small machined assemblies, circuit boards, etc.  You'll typically deal with a few mils to a few hundred or thousand mils with tolerances of maybe 1/10th mil (so one decimal place), whereas the mm is too big to not require partial millimeters (to maybe 2, 3, or even 4 decimal places occasionally) while the micron (micrometer) is so small that anything less than several hundred of them is often a uselessly small quantity.

Of course, what units you end up using are more likely to be dictated by what the controlling dimension on the overall project is.  If the project is controlled in inches, you'll probably be using decimal inches.  If it's controlled in metric, millimeters or microns.  Fractional inches suck in either case, though, since you'd end up needing things like 1/512 in to get the necessary tolerance, and that's a pain to convert to, well, anything.

Also, FWIW, I remember getting a hearty laugh out of a group of engineering students sitting in the ham radio shack back in school when I used the term "metric fuckton".  Obviously, that's larger than a standard short fuckton.

[danny_galaga]

What a mess    Fer Chrissakes guys, let go of the past and embrace metric!

[Howard_Casto]

My take:  All measurments are different but equally useful if used in the fields they came out of.

Imperical is a combination of measurments used by tailors and carpenters.  The markings were derived from the typical lengths they had to cut.  The size of the inch has actually fluctuated over the centuries, but it's ticks are usually derived from a common materials thickness.

Metric was created by scientists because they use a lot of math and base-10 fractions are a lot easier to deal with. Also because they typically deal with small quantities, the size of 1 unit was reduced.

Imperical with metric fractions as MonMotha explains, the newly emerged computer aided machining industry came up with the system. Basically they needed easily maniplulated fractions like the metric system, but it's units had been made too tiny, and thus they used the size of an imperical inch as the base. 

So:

Scientists should use the metric sytem, machinists should use imperical metric.... you and me should use straight Imperical.

[danny_galaga]

My take:  All measurments are different but equally useful if used in the fields they came out of.

Imperical is a combination of measurments used by tailors and carpenters.  The markings were derived from the typical lengths they had to cut.  The size of the inch has actually fluctuated over the centuries, but it's ticks are usually derived from a common materials thickness.

Metric was created by scientists because they use a lot of math and base-10 fractions are a lot easier to deal with. Also because they typically deal with small quantities, the size of 1 unit was reduced.

Imperical with metric fractions as MonMotha explains, the newly emerged computer aided machining industry came up with the system. Basically they needed easily maniplulated fractions like the metric system, but it's units had been made too tiny, and thus they used the size of an imperical inch as the base. 

So:

Scientists should use the metric sytem, machinists should use imperical metric.... you and me should use straight Imperical.

I think the term is Imperial. Also, the machinists theory is suspect, since a whole bunch of industrialised countries use metric in their machinery. As, I believe does the US armed forces (could be wrong on that, let me know).

Question: What measurements do they use on a Honda or Toyota made in the US?

[MonMotha]

The US DOD has converted to metric for all their new designs, but they still support a LOT of old designs.

It's not necessarily a computer aided thing; machining in the US has long used decimal inches going back to before metric was particularly popular or even known amongst the general population, here.  It's relatively easy to convert a fractional inch into decimal inches, and the utility of fractional values really starts to diminish when you get to teeny tiny quantities where "being able to easily divide it by several common factors" is no longer an issue.

Essentially all cars, both designed in the US and overseas are fully metric these days (with some weird exceptions for things like tires, which have F'd up sizing globally).  It kinda pissed off all the mechanics, since they had to go buy new tools, but that would have happened anyway since you're going to have to work on "imports" these days whether you want to or not.

There are also a lot of old standards defined in inches.  One thing that really irks me is when something was clearly designed in inches but is specified using metric measures as "authoritative".  I've even seen some (really bad) datasheets that would take a part designed on a 1/10" grid, convert it to mm, round 2.54mm off to 2.5mm, then call that measure the "authoritative" measure, giving the 0.1" dimension "for reference only", even though it was actually the correct one.

In general, I frequently use both systems of measurement.  My CAD software will happily let me pick what I'm using.  I can freely intermix e.g. a metric snap grid with an imperial database/display.  Some parts are designed in inches and work well on an inch based grid, while other parts are designed in metric and work better on a mm grid.  I've also found occasional use for 1/4mm spacing, which would itself be something of a "hybrid" oddity.  I do tend to create my production artwork measured in inches, but I give 'em 5 decimal places, so it doesn't really matter.  My fabricator will happily accept files in either format, but I know inches are far more popular (I've asked their CAM people).

I prefer to pick one system and stick with it as the "authoritative" system on a project.  What I pick mostly revolves around what I have to work with in terms of outside materials and interface.  I do use inches for circuit boards usually since I find the mil a very convenient unit for that purpose, but I often get grumbles from people for spec'ing M2.5 screws (until I tell them that a #4 is about the same size and will also work if they prefer) because I like metric screws better.

Most of the younger engineers, scientists, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, technicians I know and have worked with can easily work in either system of measurement and can handle both on a single project.  It's mostly the older "technical guys" hard-set in their ways that denounce metric.  The average American also is opposed to it, but this opposition is essentially non-present in technical fields.  FWIW, it is required by most major accrediting agencies for technical college degrees (engineering, science, etc.) that students be given problems in both systems of units in the US.  Most coursework will even mix units in the definition to make you deal with that.

[Gray_Area]

No no no, Thing. I mean....anyways. The Kessel run was a type of run, so Han did it in less distance, meaning his ship was faster and more maneuverable.

Metric is great. Why not just use it, instead of PC'ing into an american version of it?  No answer is needed.

Lastly....given the thread title.....as inches seem to be a more definitive benchmark, how do those over yonder characterize shaft length?

[Le Chuck]

No no no, Thing. I mean....anyways. The Kessel run was a type of run, so Han did it in less distance, meaning his ship was faster and more maneuverable.

Yeah, Wookieepedia is the tits

The Kessel Run was one of the most heavily used smuggling routes in the Galactic Empire[3] Han Solo claimed that his Millennium Falcon "made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs". A parsec was a unit of distance, not time. Solo was not referring directly to his ship's speed when he made this claim. Instead, he was referring to the shorter route he was able to travel by skirting the nearby Maw black hole cluster, thus making the run in under the standard distance. By moving closer to the black holes, Solo managed to cut the distance down to about 11.5 parsecs.[source?] The smuggler, BoShek, actually beat Solo's record in his ship, Infinity, but without cargo to weigh him down. A few months later, Han Solo beat both his own and BoShek's records in a run he made with Luke Skywalker.[2]

Too bad that it's an excuse that was made up to cover a gaff in script writing.  Han was bragging the speed of his vessel not the wit of his nav computers.  This is further evidenced by the fact the error was repaired in the 1976 novelization of the film which uses "standard time units" rather than parsecs.