37 year old American here. I was raised learning both and I can and have built things in both systems. Hell I’ve even mixed them on occasion. I own a metric tape measure and a metric/inch tape measure, and several inch tape measures.
Specifically for woodworking, I vastly prefer working in fractional inches, for a whole stack of reasons but mainly in the wood shop, you find yourself dividing by 2 or 3 way more often than 5 or 10. Working in a dozenal system in powers of 2 makes more sense for that than working in a decimal system in powers of ten. It’s just easier to buy rough lumber at 1 inch thick, use 1/4" of it to mill it flat and parallel so you have 3/4", and now if you need to do a half-lap joint it’ll be 3/8" or a tenon will be 1/4".
Really interesting reply, and thank you for it. I’ve spent time in metric countries, and can, to a limited degree, equate either measurement to the other. Hell, I measure my vodka shots by the ml.
Before I enlisted, I had worked as a laborer putting siding on houses, and had to make cuts in both systems. I naturally default to imperial/avoirdupois, but given that most packaging has metric on it, I can still reference a can of soda as 355 ml. When I vaped, all of my e-juice was sold in mls, too.
Like being a polyglot, learning more than one language has its benefits, but if one has only ever learned one language, the likelihood is high that any other language encountered will seem strange.
Knowledge has benefits, that’s pretty much always true. But it’s not good to require everybody else learn a different system just because one single country feels too important to switch from their homebrew system like everybody did. It reeks of arrogance instead.
Same way you’d take a third of a centimeter: Get out a micrometer and set it to 0.3333, that’ll be pretty close.
The main benefit to the metric system is it’s all base ten. One kilometer is 1000 meters, one kilogram is 1000 grams, you don’t have to memorize that there’s 16 cups in a gallon etc. For a lot of things that works well, the problem is with base ten itself. You run into the same problems with 1000 millimeters in a meter than you do trying to work in thousandths of an inch, it doesn’t divide by 3 particularly well and you get those weird repeating digits.
We kinda did have a base twelve system going, isn’t it weird how we have a special word for twelve in English? There’s 12 hours on a clock face and 12 inches in a foot. And from there, we work in powers of two.
Woodworkers don’t traditionally cut boards to 1 inch or 2 inches thick; they’re rough sawn to that thickness and then dried and milled to 3/4" or 1 1/2". Which are 1/16th or 1/8th of a foot, and both are divisible by 2 and 3 and expressed in a power-of-two fraction. a third of 3/4" is 1/4".
It works very well until someone who doesn’t actually understand it tries to contrive a way to make it not work in the same way their preferred system also doesn’t work.
For many other things, the metric system is easier to deal with, I would much rather do physics in metric than in Imperial (also I’m American, I actually use SAE) but woodworking in a dozenal system is a discipline that is millennia old, the bugs have been very thoroughly shaken out. I would rather build furniture in inches.
Woodworkers don’t traditionally cut boards to 1 inch or 2 inches thick; they’re rough sawn to that thickness and then dried and milled to 3/4" or 1 1/2". Which are 1/16th or 1/8th of a foot, and both are divisible by 2 and 3 and expressed in a power-of-two fraction. a third of 3/4" is 1/4".
Okay but then that third is more of a lucky coincidence than a function of the measurement system. That’s like saying millimeters are good for woodworking because boards are traditionally milled to, say 18mm (incidentally almost equal to ¾") and you can divide that by 2, 3, 4, 6 and 9.
And I’d argue, dealing with fractions is still fundamentally harder. They number sometimes are or aren’t convenient independent of the system used.
I carry my “bilingual” tape in my away mission bag, because that way I can get away with having one tape measure. My metric tape lives on my desk and I’ve got inch tapes dripping out of the walls. I wake up in the morning and cough up a few.
I accidentally bought an engineers ruler that’s in 10ths of a foot on one side. That’s a real pain in the ass. Or that side of the square that’s in 12ths. But I’d really like a fractional metric ruler. 7/16ths cm.
My sawyer has a tape that measures in tenths of a foot as well. Kind of reminds me of how aircraft measure time aloft; both tach time and hobbs time is measured in tenths of an hour.
Something that’s gonna tilt your head: 1 1/2" is 1/8th of a foot. And 3/4" is 1/16th of a foot. Common inch woodworking sizes like that aren’t weird fractions of an inch, they’re some power of two fraction of a foot.
Well yeah, if you were raised learning imperial measurements, you’d probably find a metric-only tape to be an criminal abomination just as easily.
37 year old American here. I was raised learning both and I can and have built things in both systems. Hell I’ve even mixed them on occasion. I own a metric tape measure and a metric/inch tape measure, and several inch tape measures.
Specifically for woodworking, I vastly prefer working in fractional inches, for a whole stack of reasons but mainly in the wood shop, you find yourself dividing by 2 or 3 way more often than 5 or 10. Working in a dozenal system in powers of 2 makes more sense for that than working in a decimal system in powers of ten. It’s just easier to buy rough lumber at 1 inch thick, use 1/4" of it to mill it flat and parallel so you have 3/4", and now if you need to do a half-lap joint it’ll be 3/8" or a tenon will be 1/4".
Really interesting reply, and thank you for it. I’ve spent time in metric countries, and can, to a limited degree, equate either measurement to the other. Hell, I measure my vodka shots by the ml.
Before I enlisted, I had worked as a laborer putting siding on houses, and had to make cuts in both systems. I naturally default to imperial/avoirdupois, but given that most packaging has metric on it, I can still reference a can of soda as 355 ml. When I vaped, all of my e-juice was sold in mls, too.
Like being a polyglot, learning more than one language has its benefits, but if one has only ever learned one language, the likelihood is high that any other language encountered will seem strange.
That’s what irks me about the “anything other than metric is stupid” crowd. Who needs less tools?
Knowledge has benefits, that’s pretty much always true. But it’s not good to require everybody else learn a different system just because one single country feels too important to switch from their homebrew system like everybody did. It reeks of arrogance instead.
Okay I’ll bite. How do you take a third of an inch, and how is it better than in millimeters?
Same way you’d take a third of a centimeter: Get out a micrometer and set it to 0.3333, that’ll be pretty close.
The main benefit to the metric system is it’s all base ten. One kilometer is 1000 meters, one kilogram is 1000 grams, you don’t have to memorize that there’s 16 cups in a gallon etc. For a lot of things that works well, the problem is with base ten itself. You run into the same problems with 1000 millimeters in a meter than you do trying to work in thousandths of an inch, it doesn’t divide by 3 particularly well and you get those weird repeating digits.
We kinda did have a base twelve system going, isn’t it weird how we have a special word for twelve in English? There’s 12 hours on a clock face and 12 inches in a foot. And from there, we work in powers of two.
Woodworkers don’t traditionally cut boards to 1 inch or 2 inches thick; they’re rough sawn to that thickness and then dried and milled to 3/4" or 1 1/2". Which are 1/16th or 1/8th of a foot, and both are divisible by 2 and 3 and expressed in a power-of-two fraction. a third of 3/4" is 1/4".
It works very well until someone who doesn’t actually understand it tries to contrive a way to make it not work in the same way their preferred system also doesn’t work.
For many other things, the metric system is easier to deal with, I would much rather do physics in metric than in Imperial (also I’m American, I actually use SAE) but woodworking in a dozenal system is a discipline that is millennia old, the bugs have been very thoroughly shaken out. I would rather build furniture in inches.
Okay but then that third is more of a lucky coincidence than a function of the measurement system. That’s like saying millimeters are good for woodworking because boards are traditionally milled to, say 18mm (incidentally almost equal to ¾") and you can divide that by 2, 3, 4, 6 and 9.
And I’d argue, dealing with fractions is still fundamentally harder. They number sometimes are or aren’t convenient independent of the system used.
No, they’re fine. It’s the bilingual tapes that are a pain in the ass. You have to guess at half the measurements no matter your preferred scale.
I carry my “bilingual” tape in my away mission bag, because that way I can get away with having one tape measure. My metric tape lives on my desk and I’ve got inch tapes dripping out of the walls. I wake up in the morning and cough up a few.
I accidentally bought an engineers ruler that’s in 10ths of a foot on one side. That’s a real pain in the ass. Or that side of the square that’s in 12ths. But I’d really like a fractional metric ruler. 7/16ths cm.
My sawyer has a tape that measures in tenths of a foot as well. Kind of reminds me of how aircraft measure time aloft; both tach time and hobbs time is measured in tenths of an hour.
Something that’s gonna tilt your head: 1 1/2" is 1/8th of a foot. And 3/4" is 1/16th of a foot. Common inch woodworking sizes like that aren’t weird fractions of an inch, they’re some power of two fraction of a foot.
Nice! Never thought of that!
I like how shipwrights used to notate dimensions, feet-inches-eighths+/- so 28 3/4" would be 2-4-6. 28 13/16ths" would be 2-4-6+
Yes, if you were also a illogical moron.