cyccommute 

Or colonialism.

So you’re a Tory? Pine for the days of Mad King George?

unterhausen

Have you ever wondered why the conversion is exactly 2.54 cm/inch? The inch isn't the same length as it was for the previous hundreds of years. From wikipedia: "The new standards gave an inch of exactly 25.4 mm, 1.7 millionths of an inch longer than the old imperial inch and 2 millionths of an inch shorter than the old US inch." The commies got to it. Of course, in history, the inch has been different lengths, and basing it off of the metric yard was a good way of fixing that.

smd4

Exactly 2.54? EXACTLY?? HAHAHAHAHA!! Clearly you don't understand the difference between the words "basing" and "conversion."

Ever wonder why one stone weighs exactly 14 pounds? I'll tell ya why: Communism!!

GamblerGORD53

One of the best things I've done is buy a metric tap and die set. Allowed me to make a bunch of parts. My DIY stems have two 8 mm bolts.
A M6 is 3x as strong as a M5, especially the nut. I drilled out my last new bike rack mounts.
Home Depot has had some metric 4 to 8 mm. Here we have Gregg Distributors with thousands of products.

PDKL45

It was a dark day when the US stopped using the shilling is all I'll say about that.

smd4

Very dark. Almost as dark as when we stopped using the Spanish Real.

79pmooney

I want to live in a world that runs on base 12. The only good thing about base 10 is that it matches our digits. (Those digits on our hands we call fingers.) So in 2023 we are still bound by a math system that evolved from cave men. We cannot even divide our basic currency or any "round number" of anything by our second most common integer, three. Divide a dollar evenly between three kids. Yet we presume to call ourselves intelligent.

smd4

I vote for measurements/currency based only on prime numbers. Should make things much easier.

cyccommute 

Yup. A Tory.

RohloffRoller

Communist Metric Stuff - I never really thought of the French Revolution as the start of Communism but I guess it was. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!

Harhir

Very well said.

smd4

And as I've gathered from a number of folks on this thread, Insanity!

Gresp15C

I'm just old enough to have experienced the attempt at converting to metric, while I was in grade school. Here's what I think happened. The message was: "Metric is easy, it's just math." Oops. People hate math. Moving the decimal point was as hard as multiplying by 12 because the decimal point is an abstract concept for most people.

English was taught by giving kids a ruler. Metric was taught by learning a bunch of conversions. Oddly enough, my friend from Canada told me that they taught Metric by giving kids a ruler.

Later on while in grad school, the physics department machinist told me: "I hate metric because of all the math." Yet he could do plenty of math in his head, quicker than I could, such as cutter offsets, radius-to-diameter, and so forth. He remembered all of the English tap drill diameters (the numbered drills). And so forth.

We screwed up how we taught it. This coincided with a growing belief that "the government is trying to take away our freedom," and somehow units of measure were involved in this. This is actually not a new thing. I read a book about measurement, and it said that for centuries, when national or regional governments tried to impose standards (as opposed to every town having its own standards), people were always suspicious that merchants would use the change-over to cheat them by shrinking portions or raising prices.

unterhausen

Conversions are difficult for just about everyone, I've seen it with my senior engineering students. That's how they tried to teach the metric system. Going cold turkey is the only way. The cynic in me thinks that if we had just converted to metric by executive fiat, there's nothing to teach. If you had asked me back in the '70s if car mechanics could adapt to the metric system, I would have expressed doubts. But now they are as comfortable with metric as anyone. Because they had to be. There is really barely anything to learn, you just start figuring out what a 13mm bolt looks like and you've gone metric.

The classic example is the 2 liter bottle. For a few months, U.S. soda companies sold 1/2 gallon bottles of soda. Then all of a sudden they switched to 2 liter. I'm not sure what drove the switch, but everyone adapted to it pretty quickly.

cyccommute 

Considering the problems people have with fractions…Dairy Queen famously failed with it’s attempt to introduce the 1/3 pound hamburger because people thought it was smaller than McDonald’s quarter pounder…, I’m rather astounded that we have kept the imperial system. Metric doesn’t really involve math. Converting from imperial to metric involves math but the actual usage of metric is pretty much math free.
.
One can never go broke betting on the stubbornness and stupidity of ‘Merican citizens.

wolfchild

M5 and 10-32 have a different thread. Trying to use a wrong one will damage the threads in the hole. and then you will have to re- tap it to a different size than original.

cyccommute 

See post 11 for the dimensions of the diameter and the thread pitch. The diameter has a 0.2mm or 0.0080” difference. The pitch has a 0.006mm or 0.00024” difference. Neither is going to damage the threads on frame and, as I pointed out elsewhere, the braze-ons on a bike are usually filled with paint and seldom chased. It’s something to use in a pinch if you can’t find metric screws.