Tenths

[gonzo]

Duuuuh
I am super embarrassed to have to ask this, but what the devil is tenths as used in the machinist jargon?

 

[ChazzC]

1/10,000” or 0.0001” or 1/10th of a thousandth of an inch

 

[Ken from ontario]

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People also ask
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What is a tenth machining?


Tenths. In machining, where the thou is often treated as a basic unit, 0.0001 inches (2.54 micrometres) can be referred to as "one tenth", meaning "one tenth of a thou" or "one ten thousandth".

 

[Cadillac]

Tenths in the machine world means to bust out your pocket book. Machining to acouple tenths square and parrallel is not easily done. Takes a good machine good setup and a good machinist to orchestrate to whole process. When you go to the fourth decimal you add zeros to the price.

 

[Nutfarmer]

We had a saying when I worked at the plant. Machinist worked to thousands of an inch and tool and die makers worked to tenth’s of a thousand.

 

[pdentrem]

We had a saying when I worked at the plant. Machinist worked to thousands of an inch and tool and die makers worked to tenth’s of a thousand.

And the designer (dreamers) who are fresh from school, design to 0.00001”! They also cannot understand why their designs are not producible and never achieve their design tolerances!

 

[graham-xrf]

@pdentrem
Yep - this happens when folk use CAD capable of designing for (say) integrated circuits, or MEMS machines, and forget the tolerances when setting out bigger stuff.

I still have to be impressed at the tolerances the most ultimate accurate mechanical devices can get to, like the gyros used for Gravity Probe B. The spherical rotors were made accurate to within the height of about 40 atoms!

 

[projectnut]

And the designer (dreamers) who are fresh from school, design to 0.00001”! They also cannot understand why their designs are not producible and never achieve their design tolerances!

I know I've mentioned this before, but it might bare repeating. When I started working in the machine building business one of the first things I had to do was to take a short course on the company standards for configurations of drawings. This included all the company standards for title block information, tolerancing, and labeling.

One of the things they tried to impress on me was not to tolerance a part any closer than necessary. They put the caution in the form of an easy to remember single sentence. For every place you move the tolerance decimal point to the left you move you move the cost decimal point an equal distance to the right.

 

[Ulma Doctor]

a tenth is this number a machinist chases to feel important, i think.
a bragging point, the way i see it. (edit- unless you are sending things to Venus or work on Aerospace things as part of your job)
i have chased tenths, but have been completely ok with thousandths

 

[mmcmdl]

When I was starting out in the tool and die trade , an interviewer asked me how many tenths were in an inch ? I answered , they're so small there must be a million of them in an inch . I did get hired !