2002-02-14 If there is one industry that is truly a posterboy for FFU, it is plastics. After visiting a company that produces plastic parts, I left feeling that this industry will be really resistant to any type of change. Even the machines that extrude the plastic are FFU. The company that makes many of the extruding machines is not 10 km from where I live. It is VanDorn.
The VanDorn factory is in Strongsville, Ohio, not 10 km from where I live. I remember them when I was in my last days in engineering college and went on a tour of their plant. They used German designs at the time and one of the engineers only job was to convert SI to FFU, even to the point of switching SI fasteners to FFU. And it appears they are still doing it. They are now owned by the German company Demag. Check out their website: http://www.vandorn.com/index_flash.htm?SID=null&DA=null&INUM=0 Demag does make its injection molders in SI. I can't say for sure, but I bet Demag sells their molders in the metric world, and Van Dorn in the non-metric. This is how companies that would find it expensive to make a metric version and an FFU version of the same machine are able to do it. Produce the different versions at two different plants and section off territories. When in Springfield, I was able to look through some plastics trade magazines and a Engineer's handbook for plastics. All were FFU. The handbook was printed in 1996. The only SI I saw in it was an appendix with conversion factors. Even all temperatures are in fahrvern�gnugenheits. It seems as much as we try to find reasons for getting rid of FFU, the luddites are able to find ways to make FFU profitable enough to keep it alive. John
