My guess is if this is his first experience with a metric customer he's
probably thinking he hopes that US never goes metric. I'm sorry, it seems
silly to say these things out loud and then expect the guy to know what your
talking about even if his tyres are metric tyres. If I knew nothing about
metric this would make me think that metric is hopelessly complex and
pointless.
Now, pointing out that the sidewall of the tyre has pressure listed in kPa
and the gauge has kPa or Bars on it and how it is just as easy to use
metric as it is to use PSI to inflate a tyre might have helped him with learning
some metric that day and showing that it isn't hard
Please take no offence to anything I've said, I agree that if I felt the
need to do such calculations I would do it in metric because it is much easier;
I just wouldn't want to introduce the average non-metric user to the
metric system in a way that they may think that metric users are overly
technical mathematically minded people that do calculations in their head that
no one else even cares about.
Richard
In a message dated 2005-10-17 23:02:03 Eastern Standard Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
I went
to the bike shop to buy a pump. They had several pumps with a gauge
with a
psi dial and a bar dial. I stuck my thumb on the end and pumped with
the
other hand and got two bars. Then I figured that if the piston area is 10
cm², I can get just over eight bars by sitting on the handle. So I asked
the
salesman what the area is. He didn't know. I searched the pump and
found that
the diameter is 31 mm. "32² is 1024, 31² is 961, so it's seven
and a half", I
calculated aloud. (I work with computers, so 1024 is a lot
more familiar than
961.) That meant I could get almost the full eleven
bars by sitting on it. I
tried to explain, "I weigh 83, so I multiply by
9.8 to get newtons. A pascal
is a newton per square meter. Ten square
centimeters is 1/1000 square meter,
so that's just over 800 kilopascals.
100 kPa is a bar, so that's just over
eight bars." The guy looked at me as
if I were telling him baseball scores.
"We measure in pounds," he
answered. I asked him, "Haven't you heard
millibars - or hectopascals - or
kilopascals - on the weather report?" He
didn't know what I was talking
about.
The dimensions on the pump are all
metric:
Bore:31mm
Stroke:540mm (actually that's the length of the tube,
the stroke is 513)
Volume:410cc³ (sic)
The dimensions of tires are
metric. The tires have their pressure indicated in
bars or kilopascals or
both. How does he expect to do his job if he doesn't
know
metric?
phma
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