who has gone metric?

277.4196 cubic inches in a gallon UK
1 litre has 1000 ml no matter where you are
 
Meh, I will add my 2 cents. Metric is sooooo much easier. To bad 'Merca can't get its act together.
I was looking at my hex wrench sets the other day. US measurements...All these numbers that are fractions. Metric..... 0.5, .75 1.0. 1.5. 2.0.... how easy is that....
When I was flying some of it was in feet, then flight levels as you got higher. Speed in knots. Fuel in pounds but to tell the fueler how much fuel to put on board we had to covert pounds to gallons. Then if we flew into Canada it was Liters. So pounds to liters. Or is that Litre?
 
MCRIPPPer said:
{Posted in 2014}actually the one thing i think will never change is carpentry. you will never see a 50x100 in the lumber store!
although 2x4 and 4x4 means nothing anyway.
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Well, nowadays {2020, and for several years previous}, plywood in the US is only available in metric thicknesses. As for the 2x4, you're right - they keep making it just a skosh smaller (claiming it's from having to plane the rough boards). Who knows, it's probably planed to metric measurements nowadays ... though 8', 10', 12', 16' etc.are still the preferred lengths.
 
petcnc said:
In my country we were born, raised and live in metric exept the plummers! They were born, raised and live in inches.
Its funny! I just realised that when you need to order a pipe you have to say 1/2 inch 3/4 inch etc. It sounds natural here to associate pipe sizes in inches.
On the other hand when I lived in the UK I noticed that they had exactly the opposite system. Everything was measured in inches and miles exept plumming! This was in metric!
What can I say! Funny world.
Petros
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... and even funnier when you realize that NOTHING about a ½" (or ¾") pipe is even close to ½" (or ¾")!
 
Being in Canada, we've got a foot in both camps. I believe my first hands-on experience with metric was my beloved 10-speed bike in the 1970's. From Canadian Tire, eh! Had to buy a few metric wrenches to work on it...and I still have them.

Since I got into metalworking a couple of years ago, I've been looking for a set of metric taps, dies and drills. They almost never come up in the auctions I've seen. Once or twice, I've seen a cheap set of metric taps and dies (Canadian Tire again) but they've been bundled up with too much other stuff that I already have or didn't want. Yeah, I'm a bottom feeder.

Re drills, I noticed the other day that tapping M4 usually specifies a 3.3 mm hole. M5 needs 4.2 mm. M8 6.8 mm. However, I've yet to see a metric drill set that includes those sizes. The more-complete ones I've seen go by 0.5 mm increments ala 3.0, 3.5, 4.0 and 4.5 mm.

For inch measurements, we can buy a 115 drill set with letter, wire gauge and fractional drills. For metric, I assume there is something similar? What is considered a machinist set of metric drills outside of North America?

Craig
PS I know I can use letter/number drills before a metric tap. Just curious what the rest of the world does.
 
when I went to school here in Australia, 1949 to 1960 I was taught in british imperial systems. We were taught that metric was a system used in Europe and the very basics of how it worked, but were not required to actually understand it.

Then during my apprenticeship, 1961 to 1966, The factory that sponsored me had the import agency for some European vehicles, SAAB and Alfa. as a consequence of this we were required to know and at times use metric.

A few years after completing my apprenticeship I became a marine engineer, and as some of the ships that I worked on were built in Europe they were fully metric. and others were built in Australia, or UK so we were constantly hopping from one to the other. I had to be proficient in both systems, and still am. Although all my Micrometers are imperial my verniers are metric. My lathe is imperial in as much as the lead screw is, but it's perfectly capable of cutting both metric and imperial threads even having its own 127T gear.

I did find it very interesting when back in the late 60's early 70's I was working on Swedish ships, based in Goteborg, that we could get all our supplies as in nuts and bolts steel bar stock etc even angle iron pipe and tube in both imperial and metric and BSP was the standard pipe thread used on board. mAll the engineering staff were quite comfortable working in either system and even using a mixture, as in get me a meter of inch by 1/4 flat bar. PSI and Kg/Cm2 were often mixed up and also bar and atmos.

Australia began its conversion to metric in 1966 by changing the money from pounds, shillings and pence to dollars and cents, but it took about twenty years for the changes to be complete gradually changing things like temperature and then linear measurements until it was all complete.
I guess that one day USA will catch up with the rest of the world, it is a much easier and simpler system. I doubt it will be by government decree, but gradually as young people grow up being familiar with metric they will find it easier and less old people to complain. in about 100 years it should be complete.
 
jumps4 said:
metric is so easy compared to imperial all on a base of ten, not the length of some guys foot divided into 12 parts then divided by 16,32,64,1000,10,000 parts
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I absolutely agree with this. Here in South Africa almost everything is metric,but I can do both. But IMO metric is much much easier than imperial. But I don't see the imperial system going anywhere so might as well learn to work with it or do the simple conversion.
 
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