Interesting, Pat. Australia (and perhaps New Zealand and South Africa too?)
must certainly be the most thoroughly metricated English-speaking countries.
But since Australia produces most of its own lumber, why isn't there a move
to get rid of the old inch-based sizes and produce dimension lumber in
rational, hard-metric sizes?
Do most householders, when speaking casually of rough measures of furniture,
appliances, pots and pans, etc., use centimeters, inches, or millimeters?
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pat Naughtin
> >
> > At the end of one days construction I was amused to see the number 2167
> written on the side of a bench; this was the size of a sheet that
> needed to
> be cut for the following morning and it was written quite
> comfortably to the
> nearest millimetre without any attempt to round it to a ten or a five.
>
> One impressive line from a young carpenter was 'where did I put the bit of
> 19 by 42 (pronounced 19 be 42) that I was using for a straight
> edge'. At no
> time did I hear any of the workers refer to timber sizes in other than
> millimetres. It seems that the trades have finally rejected the old inch
> (nominal) size numbers in favor of the simpler millimetre (actual) sizes.
>
> I am aware that my conclusion is based on an extremely small
> sample, however
> the people working on my kitchen are deeply embedded in the local building
> community and they showed absolutely no hesitation or
> embarrassment in using
> millimetres exclusively. When I asked if they were deliberately
> using metric
> because they knew I preferred it, I was firmly told that they preferred to
> work this way and it was an absolute annoyance to have to
> translate back to
> old units 'for the punters'.
>
> Incidentally, I was again struck by the number of measurements and
> calculations that a builder does in the course of a day. There
> are at least
> hundreds of them, if not thousands, and all of them are prone to error.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Pat Naughtin CAMS
> Geelong Australia
>
> > Greg wrote:
> >
> >> I'd rather buy a '40 x 140 x 2440', a '4 x 14 x 244', a '0.4 x
> >> 1.4 x 24', or even a '0.04 x 0.14 x 2.44' than a 2x6x8 any day.
> >
> > You and I might, Greg, but most people wouldn't. They will go for the
> > simplest, easiest expression.
> >
> > I think that one of the most important things we could do to encourage
> > metrication--certainly the most important item on your earlier
> list--is to
> > metricate dimension-lumber. But it will never happen unless the
> government
> > makes it happen.
> >
> > Even well-metricated countries like Australia use the North American
> > inch-based lumber sizes, according to Pat.
> >
>
>
