Newbie question :) be kind...

On Mon, 21 Jan 2008 08:36:37 +1300, I said, "Pick a card, any card" and Greg Procter instead replied:

Then clearly you should be much more humble. Work on it.

-- Ray

Reply to
Ray Haddad
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On Mon, 21 Jan 2008 08:37:54 +1300, I said, "Pick a card, any card" and Greg Procter instead replied:

Anywhere. Just like you use Imperial in your workshop.

-- Ray

Reply to
Ray Haddad

On Mon, 21 Jan 2008 08:50:39 +1300, I said, "Pick a card, any card" and Greg Procter instead replied:

Weak, Greg. Weak. Is there a correspondence course for improving your non sequiturs?

-- Ray

Reply to
Ray Haddad

Ray, I _accept_ the standards are in place. We are discussing the US populations' acceptance of the standards. It isn't happening.

US officialdom's acceptance of the standards consists of their writing "Accepted" in the statute books. US population's acceptance of the standards consists of their manufacturing/buying goods made to the standard.

Ray - New Zealanders do _not_ use US imperial measurements, we never have. Making it a requirement to use either major imperial system is in fact against the law here.

Reply to
Greg Procter

On Mon, 21 Jan 2008 08:59:31 +1300, I said, "Pick a card, any card" and Greg Procter instead replied:

No we're not. You tried to switch to that argument after you declared that the US doesn't use metric at all. Nice try.

-- Ray

Reply to
Ray Haddad

On Mon, 21 Jan 2008 08:59:31 +1300, I said, "Pick a card, any card" and Greg Procter instead replied:

Oops. Perhaps you'd like to restate that?

-- Ray

Reply to
Ray Haddad

On Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:02:59 +1300, I said, "Pick a card, any card" and Greg Procter instead replied:

There is no such thing as english. Only English.

-- Ray

Reply to
Ray Haddad

As I've said before, I distinguish between 'English' and 'english'. Obviously you don't.

So tell me, if you're asked about the road route between (say) New York and Houston, do you quote the width or the length first?

Regards, Greg.P.

Reply to
Greg Procter

On Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:06:57 +1300, I said, "Pick a card, any card" and Greg Procter instead replied:

Sydney-siders pronounce it "sid-nee." Not as you wrote it. That must be some sort of Kiwi aberration.

-- Ray

Reply to
Ray Haddad

Let's see; you make an irrelevant and unwarrented comment about the characteristics of NZ speech and it's a "joke". I respond with a comment on Australian speech characteristics and I make myself look ignorant.

Regards, Greg.P.

Reply to
Greg Procter

Shssssh! The yanks are busy making their own metre!

NO NO NO! HO is a scale ratio of 1:87 except in Britain and the USa. _Britain_ uses (or doesn't use) 3.5mm to the foot. The US sets it's own standard of 1:87.1 which is neither 3.5mm:foot nor

1:87. (NMRA standards) (they say it's "near enough", but why add the 0.1 (0.1149%) if 1:87 is near enough)

One of my current projects is the New Zealand standard Guards Van. The carpenters worked from a standard plan (well, I've found five different standard plans so far) but carpenters worked to the nearest 1/8" and it's very difficult to find two vans that are exactly alike out of many hundreds.

Regards, Greg.P.

Reply to
Greg Procter

G(regor)Y PROC(ter)?

Greg.P.

Reply to
Greg Procter

Cap screws come pre-blackened.

Sorry Wim, my previous post was a minor joke.

Frequently used mounting bolts on machinery tend to absorb oil into their painted surfaces - yellow quickly darkens to near black or dark khaki colour.

Regards, Greg.P.

Reply to
Greg Procter

It's 3.5/12*25.4 = 1/87.085714... rounded off to 1/87.1.

Reply to
Erik Olsen DK

A " 4" x 2" " would begin life as a rough sawn piece of timber 4" x 2" less half the thickness of the saw blade on each side. ie one would get

18 of these from a 12" x 12" piece. From there the 4" x 2" would be dressed (ie reduced) to whatever degree of finish the customer required.

I'd be uncomfortable with a sizing that gave one less timber (lumber US?) for one's money than was offered.

Our sheet sizes here in NZ are 2400x1200mm etc. I don't know that the size change was mandated by our government - I understood that it related to the size of new machines imported since metrication. It has taken more than 30 years for the last 2440 x 1220mm sheets to disappear from the market.

Same here, except we don't bother to translate sizes back to inch measurements.

Reply to
Greg Procter

I most certainly do, here in Canada we speak English, whereas the Americans speak something similar but without proper pronounciation and spelling.

That is a totally different matter altogether.

Reply to
Brian Smith

The Americans do not use the Imperial System for measurement.

Reply to
Brian Smith

So, currently, 2x4 is a name not a set of dimensions, even if the name has some historical ties with a set of dimensions? Even if the manufacturers were to start labeling the in metric terms many people would still refer to the item as a 2x4.

And this is worth how many posts complaining about vs ???

Paul N.

Reply to
Paul Newhouse

We call it drywall and sheetroock interchangeably.

Reply to
Steve Caple

Take length for example" You have:

- "miles": 5,280 feet.

- "nautical miles": 6,000 feet.(?)

- "Furlong": 10 chains.

- "Chains": 100 links.

- "Links": 0.66 feet.

- "Poles": 6.6 feet or 1/800th mile.

- "fathom": 6 feet.

- "Yard": 3 feet.

- "Foot": 12 inches.

- "Inch": 4 Barleycorns.

- "1/2 inch": 0.500 inches.

- "1/4 inch": 0.250 inches.

- "1/8 inch": 0.125 inches.

- "1/16 inch": 0.0625 inches.

- "1/32 inch": 0.03125 inches.

- "1/64 inch": 0.015625 inches.

- "1/128 inch": 0.0078125 inches.

- "thou": 1/1000inch.

Note that 1/64" (a commonly used dimension) is defined to _six_ decimal places of an inch, or an infinite number of places (0.00130208333.) of the base imperial measurement, which is one foot. (the inch is of course defined as 1/12th of one foot, the "4 barleycorn" definition now having being dropped - I was joking :-)

Sorry, I meant 1/2 kilogram - my wife buys the bread.

This whole discussion began around _my_ frustration of having to use metric and multitudinous US imperial measurements intermixed.

The problem with a "standard" is that it is difficult to change once it's set and accepted.

I worked in the container business from soon after it's inception through the period when industrial pressures forced the increases in size. I liased with New Zealad Railways to move containers around the country. Initially the loading gauge was marginal for moving a standard 8' high container through some mainline tunnels as it tapered from 10' above rail level at 45 degrees. (3' high wagon deck and 8' width at 10') Most tunnels would clear the upper corners of the containers (or v.v.) but some alignments conflicted. (you only need one :-) A few drop-decked wagons were built for branch-lines.

That was sorted fairly quickly, but then along came 8'6" containers and we scratched the interior linings of a few more tunnels. A Railways programme was put in place to lower the floors of main-line tunnels but we (shipping company) had to stop taller containers going to some branch lines.

The Lyttelton tunnel (major South Island port) had a tunnel built circa

1863 and this was electrified in the 1920s. The simple cure was to remove the overhead electrification.

Within a couple of years 9'6" containers began to appear. (remember, no-one actually told us these were coming, they just appeared on the wharves for us to onload/offload) This started a whole new round of track realignment, tunnel lowering, tunnel daylighting, overbridge alterations, electrification raising ... Meanwhile there was a whole rash of truckies getting jambed under bridges. Life was fun!

There isn't an international 48' or 53' standard. Here in NZ we don't even get 10' or 30' containers because ships are built with 20'/40' cells. There are some 10' national containers in use but they can't leave the country.

Yes, the non-standard lengths are _extended_ 40' standard containers. That makes them non-standard and unusable outside specific situations.

They are _owned_ by Asian businesses, not _built_ by ... You can't put a non-standrd length container on a ship, other than at the top of a stack. An extended 40' container takes _four_ spaces and stops two of those from being stacked further. In addition the container needs to be offloaded and reloaded if any container in those four stacks needs to be off-loaded. Shipping between Europe and NZ, the cost of off-loading/reloading is approximately equal to the cost of travelling that distance. Under those circumstances the cost of shipping an over 40' container is double that of a 40' container and several off-loads can double it again.

Europe and Asia are all busily converting to 230v as quickly as circumstances allow.

230v AC is the standard.

The (export) Sherline uses two measuring systems, metric (leadscrews) and US imperial (assembly).

What I'm modelling is a seperate issue. Were I modelling say European Garden scale models I'd still need to rebuild the machine to suit the size of component I'm making. I'd still be faced with US imperial specific bolts and threads.

Let me just applaud a fine Australian/US product. The Sherline is as good or better than _any_ equivalent product in the world, and the pricing is far better than the few machines that are it's equal. The major problem it has is that it does not conform to internationally standardized measurements.

Having to mix three, four or even five different measuring systems while making a model is irritating. This is a different issue to my prototype being built to an archaic measuring system - I already have to convert for scale reduction so the feet/inches/fractions simply get converted to millimeters. No problem, I accepted that when I decided to model at less than 1:1 scale.

Take a simple example: I want to fit a Kadee coupler to my new wagon. (I don't, but just say ...)

The mounting pad needs to be at 1 5/32" above the rails. (err, what's that in real numbers? Rhetorical>) So, I have to build a pad on the underside of the decking which is at

36mm. That's 36mm - 1 5/32" thickness. 36 - 29.36875mm = (say 6.6mm) My Evergreen plasticard is in .040" thickness, that's (more conversions) six and a half thicknesses.

Right, mounting pad made - now I need to screw the coupler to the pad. "Use a 3/8" 32-3/16" screw" - WTF is one of those??? Where would I buy two from??? (not in New Zealand) Will a metric size fit? Will the metric size leave the coupler flopping back and forth if the screw loosens???

You see, even without the machine tools the US imperial system is a total pain to model making because of all those different measuring systems involved.

Greg.P.

Reply to
Greg Procter

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