Consult about imperial units

1 kip = 1000 pounds 1 ksi = 1000 pounds/inch^2

To be nitpicky, pounds are units of force, whereas kilograms are units of mass, so your equivalence doesn't make quite make sense. But you probably knew that.

Regards, Rob

kips is 1000 pounds per square inch, according to one teacher I had. kips is 1000 pounds load, according to sources I find on the internet.

You'd better ask your source to define its(/his/her) units.

David A. Smith

Yes, kip is short for kilopound or something along those lines.

For pounds-mass, lbm, that's not true. But pound is pound-force by default. So..

Watch out guys, the "Units Nazi" will probably appear sometime soon and slam you because you DARE associate kg as a mass only and not a force. Don't remember what his name is, but he has a website where he slams this kind of stuff. It's fine to assume that the public will look at kg as a weight (transported goods, etc), but let him try dimensional analysis using it that way and see if it leads to the correct answer.

Sorry for the rant, but I've seen it happen too many times when this type of question appears in this ng.

V Bell H, AL

From: " snipped-for-privacy@aol.com \(formerly\)" dlzc1.cox@net

LOL. I think someone needs to teach your ex-teacher a few things!!

Your internet sources are correct ( at least as the term kip is used in the US ) and in every engineering book used in the US.

Dan :-)

Most often 1000 pounds force. Though that is sometimes hard to determine, because when you run across these units, you are often dealing with people too blamed stupid to realize that pounds are primarily units of mass. That they have been units of mass ever since pounds were first used, and that pounds force are a recent bastardization.

Good grief, pounds force are such a recent invention that they are uniquely identified by that name. Of all the hundreds of different pounds used at various times and places throughout history, only one has spawned a unit of force of the same name. Pounds force were never well defined units before the twentieth century, and even today they don't have an official definition.

So, in this dreamworld of yours, what is the standard for a pound? Who made it a standard, and when? (Just the year will do, or a range of years if that's the best you can do.)

What's the nature of this standard? Something mechanical, or electrical, or what? Where is it kept, and who maintains it?

Actually, he likely knew that pounds are, exactly, by definition,

0.45359237 kg, even if he did round it off for simplicity, since he wasn't worried about that much precision.

Try one of these (same file, I think)

and then turn up your speaker volume and go study this until you understand it completely

Dear Gene Nygaard:

I've seen units of pressure expressed quite commonly as kg/cm^2 (Japan for example does this a lot), which mathematically equates to bar pretty well. Why on Earth would someone do that?

David A. Smith

Do what? Use bars? Beats me. They are no more a part of the modern metric system than kilograms force are. Neither is part of the International System of Units (SI).

Kilograms force, of course, were once quite acceptable units, officially endorsed by the CGPM in 1901. These units are also known by the name kiloponds (symbol kp), which is really confusing when you have 1 kilopond (kp) equal to 0.0022056 kilopounds (symbol kip having taken on life as a word in its own right, so as a spelled out word it adds an "s" in the plural). or it might be 1 kp = 0.0022046 kip, depending on how you choose to define those pounds force which don't have an official definition.

Japan has, in recent years, made a concerted effort to get rid of the kilograms force. More likely to see it used in the United States than in Japan now, I'd guess.

Go metric. Use newtons (1 kip = 4.448... MN) and pascals (1 kgf/cm² =

98.0665 kPa, 1 bar = 100 kPa, 1 ksi = 6.895 MPa).

Gene Nygaard

kg/cm^2 is relatively easy to convert to PSI..... this is a good thing if your line manager is working with a mix of machines and has to do the conversion for himself :-(

-- Jonathan

Barnes's theorem; for every foolproof device there is a fool greater than the proof.

To reply remove AT

What dimensional analysis? You need some calculation to be able to do that. What is your dimensional analysis for the pounds and ounces on the label of my bottle of ketchup? For the grams there?

Net Wt. 24 oz (1 lb 8 oz) 680 g

The only people who have any problem with the dimensions of kilograms as units of weight are those idiots who are so God-awful dumb as to think that when we buy and sell goods by weight, we'd want to be measuring some quantity that varies with location. We should not do so; we do not do so; we have never done so. We've been buying and selling goods by weight for several thousand years, and we've been calling it 'weight' in English for over 1000 years. We quite properly and legitimately continue to do so today.