I used to own a Beetle, and I worked on it a lot, as it was such a simple car. The only two wrenches and sockets I ever remember using were the 10 mm and the 13 mm, and even today, years later, those two look more used than the others.
Carleton -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Pat Naughtin Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2005 18:54 To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:33543] RE: July 4 on 2005-07-13 19.26, Philip S Hall at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I think it's fair to say that people in Britain are inclined to recognise > that inches one minute and cm the next sometimes in the same context is > silly and sometimes downright inconvenient. I can remember years ago work > colleagues bitterly complaining about the mix of whitworth and metric > threaded nuts and bolts in the spares box. This was at a time when the firm > I worked for then were slowly adopting metric and the fittings were being > introduced. If the "pro-choicers" had their way this situation would persist > for ever. Dear Phil, You might recall that this problem of spanners was first recognised by Henry Ford (amongst a few others) when he became an early member of the American Society of Automobile Engineers (ASAE). Ford's focus was on changing bolts with square heads to bolts with hexagonal heads but a colleague of his, Ferdinand Porsche, went much further. Porsche's approach was to rethink the whole idea of the choice of bolts throughout automobile design. Naturally, Porsche chose metric size bolts and, in the 1931 model (that eventually became the VW Beetle), he chose to have only three bolt sizes. From memory these were 10 mm bolts used for body panels, 13 mm bolts used for engine and transmission parts, and a special 32 mm bolt used to hold each wheel including the steering wheel. All a VW mechanic required in his tool kit was a big spanner for the wheels and a two ended spanner (10 mm and 13 mm) to do everything else. This approach has remained consistent since 1931 for Volkswagen and also for Porsche cars. The savings since 1931 must have been enormous and kept the company viable through many troubled economic and war-torn times; but it is internal accounting problems that have got them into trouble now < not measurement problems < such as trying to decide which spanner to use! Cheers, Pat Naughtin Geelong, Australia 61 3 5241 2008 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metricationmatters.com This email and its attachments are for the sole use of the addressee and may contain information that is confidential and/or legally privileged. This email and its attachments are subject to copyright and should not be partly or wholly reproduced without the consent of the copyright owner. Any unauthorised use of disclosure of this email or its attachments is prohibited. If you receive this email in error, please immediately delete it from your system and notify the sender by return email.
