Dear Dennis and All,
on 30.11.2000 04.17, Dennis Brownridge at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Interesting, Pat. Australia (and perhaps New Zealand and South Africa too?)
> must certainly be the most thoroughly metricated English-speaking countries.
True, but as they say in the bush, 'Just because it's the best doesn't mean
it's any good' - we still have pockets that still require a lot of work.
> 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?
Yes, you're right and I think that that is, in fact, the overall trend - but
it seems to be painfully slow.
> Do most householders, when speaking casually of rough measures of furniture,
> appliances, pots and pans, etc., use centimeters, inches, or millimeters?
They vary. It's impossible to give an opinion based on the idea of 'most
householders'. When an estimate is made you can readily tell the background
(in SI training) that the speaker has received.
One curiosity that has arisen is that householders now know that trade
people prefer millimetres so they will often try to 'talk in millimetres' to
carpenters and plumbers when they want a household job done.
My wife maintains that the differences in language as to whether a person
uses centimetres, millimetres, or inches, not only depends on the persons
training background but also on their experience with measuring. For
example, a carpenter might make several hundreds (or even thousands) of
length measures in a normal day, while a housewife might go for several days
between length measures; on the other hand the housewife might make tens (or
even hundreds) of mass measurements in a normal day while a carpenter might
make very few.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin CAMS
Geelong, Australia
>> -----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.
