reible

OK, that was you mistake for 2004 and none to soon.......

Ed

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template tom

There are a great number of people out there who do not know what a 1/16" or a 15/16" are, and as for 3/32" or 1/64". They can understand 1/4", 1/2" 3/4" and maybe? 1/8". I have been responsible for at some of them over the years as I taught them the metric system from 1968. Personally I am convinced one of the reasons for not using the template guides is because of the cumbersome calculations required, and this has been a typical example.
I can use metric and imperial (I did not make the change to metric until I was in my thirties)
What are your views on the comments above?
Tom

reible

Tom and all,

When I was wearing an engineer’s hat and working for a large company we moved to “the metric” system. This forced me to learn more then just conversion but to even think metric. You know, “that looks like it is 300mm” not “gee that is about 12” so if I divide or was that multiply by….” As an engineer we normal worked in decimal as in that looks like 12.000 +/- .006. Mixing the systems made interesting mismatches with rounding so we did a lot of learning. As a wood worker and a student you get a lot of fraction practice and a lot of people still can’t take ½ of ¼ and get the right answer. The more you do the better you get at it……

Without a calculator who wants to convert 11/16 to decimal then 7/16 to decimal to do the math, you just learn to do it. For us it is a way of life.

I remember hearing that we would be a metric nation back in 50’s, we even started to learn the system and when I had physics in high school we used both systems. Time marched on but as we all know we are a long way from being a metric nation even now 50 years later.

As a wood worker I guess I will stick to the “imperial”, after all the tools are still that way, and I don’t see this country changing in my life time. I do now as of this Christmas have two metric guide bushings so things are changing.

Having said all that, back to the subject at hand. I often use a table to find my way around the size issues. (Sorry all you metric people… it is in fractions.) That way I can just look at what bits and guides I have and pick which one to use. If you want to keep doing the math the way you have been fine but using the chart to check your math is always an option. (Tom knows his stuff so he does't need the table but as for the rest of you, it can't hurt.)

Since the size is more limited here as an attachment I will post the chart in the gallery. If you have trouble reading it let me know I’ll post new instructions. This is an expansion of a chart I did a while back. See:
http://www.routerforums.com/general-routing/163-routerforums-amateur-night.html

If someone want a metric chart I’m willing to do one but I will need common sizes of bushings and bits in metric…..

Ed

reible

Well this did not go as easy as I hoped but anyway the table is now tables posted in gallery general other....... The earlies post is missing part of the table so I had to split it to make it work. The problem is on my end with my tools and I how I convert excel to .jpg. I will work on this another time and see if I can't get it back into one table.

Ed

cfm

A few years ago the company I was working for moved to the metric system in it's field operations here in the US.. At first my personal thoughts were that this was not the way to go. However, after getting the metric tool kit the benefit was obvious - 50% fewer wrenches, sockets, allen wrenches and so on.... Love that metric - too bad it meets with resistance in the US for that change universally. Oh well.......

All the best

cfm