A routing tutorial for beginners Part Two

harrysin said:

Someone has to get the ball rolling Ron, why don't YOU start to place the people concerned under "extreme duress"

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Harry: at one point I worked with systems of Measure. In Canada land was originally measured, (under French rule) in royal feet. Unfortunately, the royal foot changed at least once and thus we have new and old royal feet. Then the English arrived and we started using the English foot.

Then Canada became a nation and we had to start to figure out how all of this stuff had to be reconciled so it would work together. To this day, there are still lands measured in the old French king's foot, still on title and still valid. Some of the church lands that have never changed hands since their royal grant are still measured in the old methods.

Do you know how painful it is to change a system of measurement? Even your judgment of distance comes into question. I say that's 10' and everyone understands what I mean. If I say that is 304.8 centimeters, no one has a clue of what I'm talking about. An inch is the width of my thumbprint. I say 6 inches and I can measure out 6 thumbprints and get close enough for estimation purposes. 25.4 centimeters may be the same thing but there is no correlation to something humans can relate to, like a thumb print. Good grief, even today if I said an ynce was 3 barleycorns everyone has a picture in their mind of what they think 3 barleycorns look like, put three together and you have an ynce (inch prior to 1066 AD)

Ask someone what they see in their mind's eye when one says 25.4 centimeters and all you get is a blank stare.

My old system may be arcane, convoluted and regressive but I can still relate to it, I guess because I'm arcane, convoluted and regressive.

harrysin said:

Do I know how painful it is to change systems you ask. Of course I do Ron, I left England in 1964, an Imperial country, and arrived in Australia, also an Imperial country, this is until the 14th of February 1966, on that day we commenced the changeover to metric, starting with the currency. Now here you would have a distinct advantage because your currency is already metric. Gradually everything else changed but ever so slowly, as I think you were alluding to, the logistics are horrendous, like changing all speed signs as we went from 30 miles/hour to 60Km/hour, overlays were available to stick on the speedo. If we could do it, I see no reason why any country can't.

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Hi Harry - I tend to agree with you but Ron is right about being able to conceptualize distances. I have been working in both systems for nearly as long and still have some problems visualizing without stopping to think about it. Rons example wasn't exactly fair either. I think most people would say 3 meters instead of 304.8 centimeters or, better yet, 3048 millimeters.
I think it is an industry by industry thing. Automobiles have been in it since the late 60's or early 70's and it is pretty well entrenched there. Agricultural equipment will be a lot longer coming. Most brand new Ag equipment is metric but at $100,000 and up, it doesn't get replaced as often and it is not unusual to see 40 and 50 year old equipment in shops for major repair. Construction trades are a different matter as the individual has choices in fasteners and measurements and I don't see that changing. The only way I could see that area being accelerated would be building codes written in metric. I could envision a civil war over that one though. JMHO

First of all, I want to thank Harry for the wonderful step by step tutorials, both metric and imperial. As always there is little, if anything left out. I only wish I had the time to spend in my shop to make things, let alone the time to photo document it etc.
BRAVO Harry.

With that taken care of, here is my 2 cents on the imperial metric debate (which I suspect could be a thread of it's own if not an entire website). Apologies to my Father and Grandfather who would roll over in their graves if they read this.

As a 3rd generation carpenter for some 30+ years, that is firmly entrenched in the imperial system, day in and day out, I can fully understand the reluctance to convert to metric. The imperial system is, as second nature to me as the metric system is to Harry and others here. I compute fractions in my head all day long and think nothing of it. But I can just as easily do the same with the metric system. Conversely, I don't believe that the same can be said for those entrenched in the metric system, and that is my point here.
Harry is right, the imperial system is archaic. I don't think that anyone who uses the metric system has any more trouble visualizing and/or relating to what a meter is than we do to what a yard or a foot is. It's all a matter of what you're accustomed to. Ron if you told me something was equal to 3 barleycorns, I would look at you as if you had a third eye. I would have no more idea of what that represented than I do of what a royal foot is. (Though I might have a guess at that one) Everywhere you go you see things in metric you just don't realize it. All vehicle odometers read in tenths of a mile, "Left lane closed in 1000 feet". While that example uses feet it is using them in units of 10.
The beauty of the metric system is that all of it's units of measure relate to one another in units of ten. (Not coincidentally, the number of fingers most of us have.)
The imperial system doesn't have any such continuity. Sure everyone knows there are 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 5280 feet to a mile, etc. But there is no consistent relationship to them and they have NOTHING in common with our liquid and weight measures.
I can only imagine how difficult it would be for someone, trained in the metric system to learn imperial. Whereas those of us trained in the imperial system already know the metric system. Since, as Harry pointed out, our monetary system is essentially metric.
My only real concern over changing to metric would be... What will we call a 2 x 4???
Just my opinion on this, for what it's worth.

We need a metric FOOT equivalent

I agree with Tim's comments- great job Harry.

As for the metric/imperial thing, I just wish there was a 'foot' sized unit that was commonly used. Meters work great for yards, KM for miles, mm for a fraction of inches, etc, but no handy 'foot' sized unit.

I didn't realize how big an issue this could be until I started working on ships built to Korean plans. On a ship that is 600+ foot long, all the dimensions are given in milimeters. This is done so that all the units on the drawings are the same and you know were the decimal is. Where in the imperial, piping would be specified in inches, and most everything else in feet, the metric way is a little confusing from time to time.

Add that to having to learn how to start thinking in Bar, kPa, cubic meters, etc... I have to carry a table in my pocket. Such is life I guess. The odd thing is the power for my imperial ship was rated in MegaWatts, the power for the metric ship is in Horsepower... should be the other way around!

What's really confusing is when the posted speed limit is in MPH and the road is marked off in km, or yards as I saw in Wales a while ago.

Dr.Zook said:

Tim, a 2 x 4?
I guess a 51 x 102!!!!!!

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Dave, we call it a 100 x 50, which they now are. Difficulties can arise when renovating old houses because the metric "equivalent" isn't an exact conversion. I believe that corrugated iron and fibre fence panels are sill made in very small runs to cater for such renovations.
Even after all these years of metric, I/we still refer to such things as air pressure in lbs/sq" in spite of it no longer being an official unit. Overall though it works very well, when shopping at the supermarket it's so easy to calculate in one's head which is the better value, the large box or two small ones, very often it's the two small ones, the small ones are never exactly half the weight of the large ones, it's usually something like 500grams and 235grams in an attempt to confuse the public.
In summary, who cares whether you go metric or not, so long as metric routers*, cutters and template guides are produced!
Strangely, our routers still have 1/2" and 1/4" collets, but take metric guides and are held together with metric screws.