10mm basswood or hard balsa

Oh, I wish you hadn't said that! Now I'm going to have to give that a shot....er, try.

Harlan

And I thought it was confusing trying to figure out the old British Standard fastener sizes! Yikes!!! The first Volvos brought into the USA had SU carburetters (British Standard fittings) Bosch generators (metric fittings) and SAE drivetrain bolts. I had to have THREE sets of tools back then. BTW, for those of you not aware of it, the British haven't always measured their bolts in even fractions. iFor instance, a 1/4BS bolt had a 15/32" head, IIRC.

I've experienced such stuff with European aircraft plans. British plans call for a specific gauge of wire or sheet metal, whereas we in the USA would specify diameter in fractions and thickness in thousanths of an inch.

Mercy, me, look at all the fuss I've created, just because I wanted some

10mm square stock! :-[

Geoff, who has ten fingers and ten toes, so finds the decimal system easy

I still say you would find base 8 easier if you had started with it. When I worked as an aircraft mechanic, on the wall in every hangar bay was a conversion chart for decimals and common fractions. Decimals follow the "counting by tens" method, which is why we specify .062 aluminum, for instance, whereas "common fractions" are common because of the human tendency to divide by 2 over and over, yielding 1/16" for the same piece of aluminum.

There's nothing inherently easy about counting 10. It just happens to be the number of digits we have on our hands. However, counting by 8 would be inherently logical and easy. 1/4 would be .2, 1/2 would be .4, and 3/4 would be .6. What we know as 1/16 would become 1/20 in base 8, which would be the same thing as .04. It's quite intuitively obvious, unlike those crazy decimal/fraction conversion charts. In base 8, "common fractions" and decimals (or octimals) would be the same thing. Sometimes I wish that I could see how the world would be different with base 8 math. I believe that if that counting method were standard, everybody would find basic math quite obvious and simple. And we probably would never have had quite so many different measuring systems.

Here in Cracker Country of Florida, pi = 3.14159265

Holiday Cheers -- \_________Lyman Slack________/ \_______Flying Gators R/C___/ \_____AMA 6430 LM____ / \___Gainesville FL_____/ Visit my Web Site at

The message from "Lyman Slack" contains these words:

Here in the UK us ship model builders have to be pretty accurate, its

3.14159265358979323846264 or thereabouts but when I am bnilding model aircraft I use the much more accurate T.A.C.E system of measurement (Thats About Close Enough)........;-),

regards, Terry

The message from Geoff Sanders contains these words:

The thread diameter would be the 1/4 and 15/32 the head across the flats I think, I used to buy AF (Across Flats) tool sets as they were particularly useful although not a perfect fit in many cases, I could understand UNF, Whitworth, BSW and even Metric but BA sizes take some understanding if you havnt had much experience of them before, the BA system as you may know doesnt give a diameter but goes by a number i.e

2BA or 6BA or whatever so if possible I stick to Metric sizes as the taps and dies are much cheaper,

regards, Terry

.And what if the concept of zero had never been invented and we were still stuck in the Roman numeral system? (-:

Bill(oc)

Meters per minute would be used in this context. There is no prefered use of either, in fact I have used Feet per Second a lot more than Feet per Minute.

The English did the same, ever hear of a knot? It was standardized so that 60 Nauticle Miles to one minute of lattitude. Or one second of lattitude.

ROTFLMAO

Deleted needless rant.

So you don't know that one, I have to look it up myself. Original one fluid ounce of water was to be one ounce of weight which would make it exactly 8 pounds per gallon, but someone some where changed this.

WoW, don't know if you have good memory or a good calculator.

Which is stupid and hard to remember.

They can use whatever they want, its commercial applications which would be affected.

>

IMO I like Base 16 better. Shorter numbers.

Should have added that base 8 and 16 are fairly common in the computer industy, many computer scientests and engineers can easily convert binary to octal and hexadecemil.

The message from snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net (Bill Sheppard) contains these words:

I think some government departments still are, in the Uk our fluid measurment is different to the US, a pint is 20 fluid ounces and a gallon is 8 pints so a gallon weighs ten pounds, a litre is 1.76 pints so there are 4.54 litres to the gallon and the Brit government now makes it illegal to sell fluids by anything but Metric measurement, talk about a mixed-up world we live in.

regards, Terry

Thanks for laughing. It was supposed to be at least a little bit funny. I'll make sure to check with you in the future to determine whether my rants are needed.

LOL Actually I understand some of your pain. I may never get used to the fact that it is very comfortable at 25 degress C. But metric would make engineering calculations easier.

The message from "Sport Pilot" contains these words:

Wish it was 25C here, its 0C with heavy frost and most of the airports in the southern UK are at a standstill because of fog, just what we needed with the holiday coming up,

regards, Terry

Flew in 22C weather last weekend! I think it was about 20C Saturday and 22 Sunday!

Near Atlanta Georgia.

The message from "Sport Pilot" contains these words:

Parts of the UK had so much frost it looked like a layer of snow, early this morning at half light everything around here including the trees were white and although it did look very festive it was bloody cold!, wife set off to visit the son who lives about 150 miles away in South Wales and turned back as the south west was solid with traffic crawling around in the fog and the train services are overflowing with people who are trying to get where they want to go but so many flights have been cancelled they have taken to the trains and roads instead. The main route from London to South Wales and Cardiff is the M4 and it is suicidal at the best of times but today has brought a new high in congestion and traffic jams, hopefully things will start to improve around mid day tomorrow but we are not holding our breath,

regards, Terry

Would you call your wife/girlfriend "frigid" if she had a temperature of

37ºC? That's equal to 98.6ºF, but it sure sounds cool! :-)

ROFLOL!

Somehow I don't think the term 'frigid' in that context has anything to do with measurable temperature. I guess you could go take her temperature and report back, with whatever she left alive...

Sport Pilot wrote:

LOL Actually I understand some of your pain. I may never get used to the fact that it is very comfortable at 25 degress C. But metric would make engineering calculations easier. Would you call your wife/girlfriend "frigid" if she had a temperature of

37ºC? That's equal to 98.6ºF, but it sure sounds cool! :-)