I hate old cars

Isn't metric so much easier to understand....sick of working out if 7/16ths is bigger or smaller than 3/4 and if its AF or Whitworth.
Will never grumble about VW's again!
Rant over.

 

Well now you know what
That 11mm spanner is for!

7/16ths is pretty close

 

Go and sit on the naughty step ... it's more like 11.11mm

 

3/4 = 12/16!
Metric sounds like a good idea for you

 

Who would think of a system designed around base 2 (doubling and halving of numbers, power of 2) would ever take off, eh?

 

I have a nice set of AF and Whitworth for my MGB. I was brought up on fractions as a kid and liked doing the arithmetic.

 

Just use both. Metric’s consistent, but Imperial units are far more “human”.

 

I still use inches for my upholstery. 1/2" seam allowance makes the maths dead easy

 

I can still do fractions like 3/4 + 5/9 and 1 3/8 - 2/3 and so on. Remember the rules for multiply and divide? In primary school we had to learn rods, poles and perches, chains and furlongs, pints, quarts and gallons, pounds and ounces and hundredweight. A pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter 8 pints to the gallon so a gallon of water weighs 10 pounds (lbs). Drummed into us and made to recite it in class so I still remember it all.

 

A thou is a nice unit of measurement (thanks, Joe Whitworth). You can see a thou. Who can imagine a hundredth of a millimetre?

I always use imperial when measuring enginey-bearingy stuff, metric for the rest

 

But that's where bit goes wrong, it should be a 1024th

 

Nope. Joe Whitworth insisted it should be a decimal thousandth of an inch, bang on.

 

Decimal and inch, we could file that one under oxymoron

 

Sir Joe's thoughts in 1857:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Misc..._Paper_on_Standard_Decimal_Measures_of_Length

 

Perhaps, I should have said decimal and the fractional inch?

I still think we should work in base 2

 

Why not use both? Fractional is good ‘cos everything’s divisible by lots, but smaller than a 1/64th caused problems (hence Joe’s proposal for decimal inches). He was a clever lad.

 

It's mixing units that's the real problem, I guess.

 

Adjustable spanner

 

A device for rounding off any fastener you apply it to...