stone "enge moment

[J Pearce]

I quite agree Andrew, some people have a weird love of centimetres that can only possibly hark back to primary school art classes. Millimetres and metres are proper units, with sensible accuracy.

 

My gotcha is the plotter in our office, the driver and config utility for which uses a mix of mm and cm, meaning I often end printing custom size jobs at a 1:10 scale...

[timsabre]

I quite agree Andrew, some people have a weird love of centimetres that can only possibly hark back to primary school art classes. Millimetres and metres are proper units, with sensible accuracy.

 

Having just had 2 children go through primary school, this is one of my major bugbears - why do they teach everything in centimetres???? Nobody else in the world uses centimetres!

[mar]

I guess cm is taught in schools because it is a scale they can visualise easily. mm are too small and fiddly and too precise for their level of accuracy and m is far too big for them to deal with. Most objects they might try and measure are going to be a manageable number in cm. No point working in a scale which makes the numbers bigger than they can count.

[Seano]

Finding out that on one side of an american tape measure there's imperial feet, and on the other, decimal feet (feet divided into tenths, not inches)

 

That's what the yanks call an "engineering" tape.

 

I work out bridles on a calculator, sometimes working in metric but usually in feet, so decimal feet are actually quite useful for me.

Ideally I'd like a long (10m odd) steel tape that has decimal feet and metric (but no inches) - fat chance of ever finding one of those.

 

A few years ago I saw some 30m surveyors tapes in a bargain bin for £2 each. Seemed ok, so I bought the lot and used them a few times quite successfully on the metric side before I lent them to someone else to trim a load of trusses and he found out what was wrong with them: on the imperial side they'd been printed out of position, and instead of having zero at the end of the tape it was randomly somewhere within about a foot or so of the end. Oops. It was late, everybody was tired (I'd gone home), and apparently they finally twigged when someone said something like "Well this *is* at 40'... 12.2m" and the reply was "This says 40' too.. hang on.. 12.5m!"

[Stuart91]

I've been thinking about this, and I now realise that I'll state lengths in cm when I'm measuring roughly, and mm when there's more accuracy required. So offcuts of timber get measured in cm and then the measurements for pieces cut for construction are in mm. It's also an easy way of telling at a glance whether a piece has been cut to size or not.

 

Of course, this works fine for things that you can look at - it's clear that a piece of wood with "550" scrawled on it is 55cm and not 5.5m. I imagine it could cause all sorts of problems elsewhere.

 

I'm of the right age that I learnt metric in school and imperial from parents and others, so I'll ask for things like a 1m length of 2x2" timber and confuse younger colleagues.

[Andrew C]

Nah, feet & inches for rough, millimetres if it actually getting "designed".

 

Must be my age...

 

Mrs C is a seamstress (NOT in the "Discworld" sense!!) and uses cm. I think she does it to confuse me.

[andy_s]

Nah, feet & inches for rough, millimetres if it actually getting "designed".

 

Must be my age...

 

Mrs C is a seamstress (NOT in the "Discworld" sense!!) and uses cm. I think she does it to confuse me.

 

surely that's a tact thing - can you imagine how p'd off your average actor (F) would be if you told her her waist was six hundred and fifty? even sixty five sounds a bit on the large side to me, being used to imperial...

 

(tongue-in-cheek emoticon required here...)

[mark_h]

My, now retired, dad when working as a trainee architect had some older colleagues who thought, and designed, in feet but then gave over accurate conversions to metric- much more accurate than any builder could ever achieve.

 

When working as a cinema projectionist we used to refer to reel sizes in k-feet (a 12k reel being 12000 feet). It is a bit odd that the width of film was measured in millimetres but the length was measured in feet (16 frames per foot, 24 frames per second).

 

For added confusion we should consider deci/deca (d/da) metres.

[MarkPAman]

I guess cm is taught in schools because it is a scale they can visualise easily. mm are too small and fiddly and too precise......

 

Find that a centimetre is approximately 2.54 times too small.

 

I once had a custom bracket and hinged plate made to cover the controls of a plasma TV on a foyer wall. I designed it in mm, then wrote cm on the plan. When it arrived it could almost cover the whole TV, though it did explain why the delivery charge was so high! It's probably still in the basement store with people wondering what it's for......

[w/robe]

Mrs C is a seamstress (NOT in the "Discworld" sense!!) and uses cm. I think she does it to confuse me.

 

The world of costume is slowly moving from inches to centimeters. There is really no point in using mm as it is very unlikely that you will want more accuracy than 0.5cm.

 

I use inches for costumes as they make sense to me. I can imagine someone 5'6" tall, chest 37", waist 26", hip 39" the equivalent in metric would mean nothing to me.

 

Just to add to the confusion while fabric is bought in linear meters and the widths are quoted in centimeters the widths are actually in sensible imperial measurements normally 60". I suppose this is the same for sheet material (8' x 4') and therefore steeldeck etc.

[boatman]

.

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I suppose this is the same for sheet material (8' x 4') and therefore steeldeck etc.

 

Sadly not. A metric 8 x 4 sheet is actually slightly under 7' 10½" x 3' 11¼"

[kerry davies]

Carpets drive me bonkers. They still often price them by square yard yet sell them by square metre while estate agents measure rooms in feet.