Re: I need to move to Europe

[David Boyd <john@dboyd.demon.co.uk>]

If a nation as steeped in conservatism and tradition as the UK can change
over to metric, so can the US.
I don't think anyone here would now say it was not an extremely beneficial
thing to do - there were the  inevitable changeover problems of course but
nothing significant.

A UK project engineering company I was with for many years once took on a
many millions of dollars design and build project for heavy process plant in
America, with the manufacture of many major components sourced from all over
the world. The  problems caused by everyone except the client working to and
specifying metric units and components were immense, even when we were aware
of them and tried to anticipate them. Even your friggin paper sizes have to
be different !

I sometimes wonder whether remaining a bastion of archaic measurements and
sizes is seen by some there as a secret weapon against foreign competition.

One small lingering problem in the UK is that we keep our tooling so long
that young people come onto the shopfloor knowing nothing of thousandths of
inches and the like but find that much of the equipment is still calibrated
as such. But it is a slowly diminishing problem (most of them know nothing
of applied mathematics anyway, so it's just something else they have to be
taught for the 'real' world.)

Regards

David
****************************************************
john@dboyd.demon.co.uk
Cumbria, UK.

-----Original Message-----
From: four.rings@MCIONE.com <four.rings@MCIONE.com>
To: ScottyCBoy@aol.com <ScottyCBoy@aol.com>
Cc: Quattro@coimbra.ans.net <Quattro@coimbra.ans.net>
Date: 01 February 1998 05:15
Subject: Re: I need to move to Europe


ScottyCBoy@aol.com wrote:
> I need to move to Europe

Join the crowd. Right Chris, James, George?

--
Igor Kessel, who still stubbornly thinks
that a week starts on Monday,
that there are 24 hours in a day,
that water freezes at 0 and boils at 100C,
that he is 182cm tall and weighs 85kg.
:^)