Question about imperial units

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31 comments, last by way2lazy2care 12 years, 8 months ago

[quote name='ChurchSkiz' timestamp='1311694694' post='4840590']
[quote name='Luckless' timestamp='1311692028' post='4840564']
[quote name='Hodgman' timestamp='1311687526' post='4840511']
0+ is a very cold day.
[size="1"]N.B. subjective interpretation of temperature affected by locale of reference.


Very subjective.

0+ is a cool to chill day, but still acceptable shorts weather if you don't plan to be outside for extended periods of time.


Personally I use feet, inches, and fractions of an inch for construction. But I only do that because 90+% of building materials sold in Canada are still cut to Imperial measurements. (This is for economic reasons. Mills producing stuff here can then produce the same stuff and ship it down to the US Market, and we can buy materials off the US Market without getting weird looks when we ask for something in cm.)


The moment metric cut materials become common here, I'll toss my imperial tapes in the back of the tool box and forget about them.
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If you're tapes don't have metric and imperial measurements, you bought the wrong ones. I haven't purchased a ruler or tape measure without both since I was in kindergarden. Even my Gerber multitool which has barely enough room to write the numbers has metric and imperial units.
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No, I very much bought the correct tapes, scales, and rulers. The first thing I do when I get a tape that has both metric and imperial is toss it out and go looking for a real tool. A dual marked tape is a tape that you can only measure from one side of.

When you measure for construction or drafting, you measure from base lines. If you have your tape hooked at the base line and are marking out points on the floor, then a double scaled tape means that you possibly have the wrong scale against where you are marking, and then you're kind of eye balling your lines.

For what reason would you ever want both imperial and metric at the same time? I've been around construction sites since I was about 5, and in those 20 years I've yet to use a metric tape on a job site for anything other than assembling precision equipment that was designed in metric.
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Different strokes for different folks I guess. If I'm doing a small project with small tolerance (like measuring flooring or something) I just change the orientation of the tape measure. If it's a larger project then I can handle the tolerance of eye balling to the other side of the tape (which is probably < 1/16"). I'm not an engineer or anything but I imagine the drag or curve in the tape measure is going to give error rates greater than the small error I would get from transcribing a mark a 1/2" away. You're probably using a much more accurate device than me though.

I've used metric for measuring things like tires, and ordering parts for things that were made in other countries. I could probably count on 2 hands how many times I've used metric on my tape measure, but it's faithfully there whenever I need it.
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30+ is a nice summer day smile.gif 40+ is a sweltering summer day. 50+ is a die-of-heat-stroke day. 20+ is room temperature. 10+ is a cool day. 0+ is a very cold day. Minus anything is a frozen day.
140 is a slow cooking temperature. 180 is moderate. 220 is very hot.
You are now accustomed to degrees Celsius! biggrin.gif
[size="1"]N.B. subjective interpretation of temperature affected by locale of reference.
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How does that fit in with my stove which can be set anywhere from 1 to 9?

History of Fahrenheit

Regardless, I didn't say what it was based on, I said it was a good measurement for human tolerances.


I was elborating not arguing.

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