In France, and I suspect in the rest of the world, machinists talk in 1/100th of a mm (centieme in French). The 'centieme' is a very good fractional unit when dealing with hardware. It is not harder to talk in 1/100th of a mm than in 1/1000th of an inch. The micrometre (micron in French, as you correctly stated) is seldom used outside of metrology labs, optics and specialized applications.
After 33 years in France, and 22 here in the US, I must say I have not completely converted, by a long shot. The Imperial system is just too ridiculous. It is an offense to common sense. BTU/hr? please spare me :-) The Brit's in their belated wisdom (they invented the Imperial system after all) decided to keep the old units for beer (pint) and do away with the rest. That's fine with me! Interesting related event: the local grocery store has a ham cutting machine that has a dial calibrated in mm. This is apparently not uncommon in this country, these machines are probably imported. The other day, as I was buying ham, a new employee asked me how thick, so, of course, I said 1.5 mm. You should have seen the look on his face, he had no idea what I was talking about. So I told him it was lingo for putting the dial between 1 and 2, so he just turned the dial and did not ask any question... Didier KO4BB John Miles wrote: > The other reason the machinists aren't thrilled with SI units is that > thousandths of an inch are actually a pretty good match for the precision > they usually deal with. In SI, you'd have to deal with micrometers > (microns?), which is too much resolution for most applications, or > millimeters, which is nowhere near enough. > > -- john, KE5FX > _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list time-nuts@febo.com https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts