Just heard on the 6 pm news that the EU have backed down on forcing the UK to make selling anything by reference to imperial measures illegal by
2010. They said the present derogation will be extended indefinitely.Don't you just love it when bloody bureaucrats get put back in their box!
Would prefer to use metric myself, but is simply not possible to avoid using both on occasions.
David
No great surprise. They were suposed to have done away with imperial for good by 1980, then a 10 year extension, then another 10 year extension, then yet another 10 year extension. And now an "indefinate" extension. They keep waiting for America to metricate, so it might be a while yet
regards Kevin
The one thing that really gets to me is that in or out of their box, we are the mugs who are paying for them to discuss (at excruciating length) these "vital and complex" issues. Perhaps though, as long as they are spending their time doing these sort of irrelevant (they would just be ignored anyway) things they are not dreaming up more damaging "good ideas". Oh no, silly me, that is another department entirely and guess who is paying for that as well. I'm not a political animal just have better things to spend my tax on, if only they would let me.
Regards
Keith
Celebrate with a pint....
Celebrate with 1.76 pints even
Regards, Tony
Did you spill the other 0.24 ?
-- Regards,
John Stevenson Nottingham, England.
Visit the new Model Engineering adverts page at:-
Anyone know why beer comes in 440 ml = 15.4858287 Imperial fluid ounces tinnies?
Is that about a pound (I mean lb)?
David
Heard the same and feel the same, let natural selection take its own route and its own time - no need to make something we are all accustomed to, and happy with, suddenly illegal. Imperial beer and metric wine, no bother to me!
Steve (Cheshire)
Anyone know a good (ie. cheap) supplier of BSF cap head allan screws in reasonable (100 off) quantities? They seem to be getting less common.
Mark Rand RTFM
Thats the trouble with us Brits, we are too laid back, wait and see wha
happens. Meanwhile the backdoor men ( Brussels) are sticking us in th ribs with their sharp knives, when Edward Heath took us into th market, he knew full well what lay ahead, dirty tricks and double talk it was rumoured that he got a fair backhander for his troubles, Ton Blair has gone along and made it worse, i have to wonder about th country my adult kids will have to live in, Dav
-- DCree
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Given the amount of legacy measures in use, it pretty much just means that everyone should be fluent in a couple different systems. When trying to find a bearing for a particular circumstance, having some bilingual measuring capability is a real asset, too.
Lesse. Old English bikes, Rolls aircraft engines, new cars, old machine tools. Yup! Gotta be able to speak at least two kinds of Imperial measurement (or a dozen or more if you subdivide down all the different industry standards) as well as a couple flavors of metric for good measure (Oooh, bad pun, and unintended, too).
Cheers Trevor Jones
Worth noting that the USA has used metric measures as the fundemental standard since the late 1800's. The inch in the USA is defined as a fraction of a primary metric unit.
Not that this means that the average resident of the USA can visualise a millimetre. However Quentin Tarrantino did explain in Pulp Fiction that the quarter pounder didn't exist in France; It's "Royale" in France due to the metric system.
Charles
In message , Mark Rand writes
Try EKP ?
I wish I could figure out what units collets are made to. I have just been measuring one up for Hardinge to match (for a 1940s British lathe), and the dimensions don't seem to be either rational fractions of an inch, round numbers of thousands of an inch, or round numbers of millimetres. Very odd.
Steve (Cheshire)
Because it is difficult to contain without the tin
That changed somewhere in the 70's last century. Before, it was something like 25.39997mm or such.
Nick
A very long while.
Wes Michigan, USA
On or around Wed, 09 May 2007 09:59:42 -0400, snipped-for-privacy@lycos.com enlightened us thusly:
I venture to suggest that snowballs in hell are more likely.
Eventually the Americans will go to the store and find that there are no imperial size bolts in stock any more.
Most of their industrial base has quietly gone metric, and has been doing so for years. A friend of mine had to go buy his first set of metric wrenches a few years back when he discovered that the "special" bolts in his Chevrolet truck were all metric :-).
Eventually it will take over the remaining industries.
On the plus side, as long as the US keeps on its path of most resistance, there is a good supply of inch sized bolts and hardware to be had to fix the old stuff.
I don't give a darn either way. I have to deal with airplanes built in imperial sizes, vehicles in metric, and old bikes that still have a smattering of Whitworth sizes aboard, and occasionally, ball bearings that are a mix of both.
No biggie!
Cheers Trevor Jones
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