But is it? most people now accept metric as it is widely used for wood and various sizes.

Just learn to use both standards, all white goods give metric sizing. So a DRO ihas the switch between the two, good.

Ridiculous, they will bring back empire day next. No wonder politicians are held in contempt

I've still got the marks on the handle of the coffee spoon I pinched from my dad in 1973, where I set the magneto on my BSA A10 to 13/32" BTDC.

But my 2 sons and their families can't abide Imperial – they think it's deliberately arcane and difficult, which perhaps is part of its quirky charm.

Try getting a replacement 2' x 18" manhole cover!

When the galvanised steel one in my garden rotted away (taking with it into the sewer the wife's prize plant pot and contents) I was unable to buy a replacement. To get over this I had a mate with a bending machine make me up one in 2.5mm plate. The Builders Merchant told me the only way to replace these manhole covers was to fit the metric ones which meant rebuilding the top of the brickwork to suit the new cover and its frame. My mate now knocks out batches of imperial covers of 50 a time and they sell like hot cakes!

Martin

Fiddling while Rome burns comes to mind. Are they going to redefine the pound as a fraction of a kilogram the same way the USA defines their inch as 25.4mm?

Martin C

Edited By Martin Connelly on 17/09/2021 16:05:38

I like imperial, I am 77, you deal with it

Mick 😁

..I am sure that for foodstuffs it makes little difference as long as you aren’t supplied with 453.6g and charged for 500g'

Are you sure your not; & by the way I've not seen anything on sale with a weight of 453.6g it's always 100g, 450g, 500g, 1kg increments.

George.

This is going to degenerate into a stand off between die hard imperialists and rational people who can see beyond the ends of their noses

What's the betting/odds that petrol will not be sold by the gallon? £6.91 for a gallon – you must be joking!

I'm 78, so older than Mick above, and I much prefer metric. Indeed, I find metric linear measurements much more understandable than imperial. Capacity measurements & weights are someway behing linear measurements, but slowly I'm getting there, and I don't want to go back. Indeed, the whole concept of imperial I find to be a recipe for disaster. Think pennies, shillings, pounds, what a rotten system requiring an in depth knowledge of the 12 times tables and the 20 times table. 100p to the pound is so much easier. Similarly, ounces/pounds/stones/hundredweights/ton's etc. requiring a knowledge of 16's, 14's, etc.

So, as far as I am concerned, although brought up as an imperial child, and am to an extent struggling with the visualization of the various metric quantities, I am slowly becoming au fait with it, indeed in some instances I already do think metric in preference to imperial.

It will be a bad day if we have to revert to imperial.

Peter G. Shaw

I'm 79, 80 in a couple of months, doing model engineering has made me think back to my apprentice days on the shop floor and drawing office and realise now how ridiculous trying to use dimensions such as 37/64" was. Nostalgia apart, metric is far more logical.

I do however after so many years have the ability to be able to quickly convert in my head approximations of imperial to metric and vice versa. The industrial fan industry I (still) work in deals with markets all over the world and mechanical, chemical, electrical engineers etc. all with favourite units such as cubic feet per minute, m3/hr, inches water gauge, pascal, millibar ad infinitum. There are times however when the metric system falls down, I can readily convert all these but I have always said the bloke that invented inches water gauge new what he was doing, you can see a column of water, how do you visualize a pascal? Easy, convert it to inches water gauge!!

Bill D