Is Using Inches vs. Centimeters a Choice or a Habit? 

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On the choice/habit of units. I recently came to a related realization about the units I use - growing up in the UK in the 1970's and 80's means I've always been fluent in metric and imperial, so I'm lucky that I can think and convert with no friction. I compounded this by studying astronomy which has a whole set of wacky units to deal with distances between planets and stars, as well as subatomic units and relativistic units. Oh and a lot of old astronomy books used a different kind of Metric units for good measure. So, when working on a problem I'll work in whatever units get me the answer fastest. And now I'm a pilot I get feet, miles, nautical miles, celsius and pressure in inches of mercury when I listen to the weather, because this was something standardized by many nations in the past.

In the UK we use a curious mix of Metric and Imperial and we tend to use Imperial for body weight (stone and lbs). I finally made the switch to metric for my bodyweight when I had to regularly have my bodyweight taken for chemo-radiotherapy. It has stuck and is a pleasant reminder of beating cancer.

It's also a generational thing. My parents used imperial measures but we learned metric in school, so I tend to flip between both depending on what I'm measuring.

As a kid I used inches. When I started working in labs everything was metric. I adapted and can't imagine ever going back

When I started my apprenticeship we used imperial one year later we switched to metric, it didn’t take long to get used to it and it was actually easier and quicker to get accurate measurements.

At my old job, I was the only one who used metric. The software we used had metric dialog boxes but has the option to display inches on the status bar. People resized things using the mouse, and were virtually never able to get 1.000 inches. One day, a manager came to ask me why I used metric, because apparently that was causing problems whenever anyone came to assist me. (I wrote measurements on the order forms in centimeters, sometimes millimeters.) The look on her face when I typed 25.4 in the Resize dialog box and got 1.000 inches was priceless. 😂

I grew up with metric, but building and repairing guitars means that I've had to learn a great deal of imperial, as that's the industry standard measurement for designs and a lot of the luthiery tools one uses. It's helped by the fact that I inherited my grandfather's workshop and he always worked in imperial, having started his joinery apprenticeship in 1954 before metric was standardised in Australia.

I’m old (70), and grew up with inches. Working construction in the 70s and 80s, I used imperial. Traveling the rest of the world in the 80s, I learned metric easily and adopted it pretty thoroughly. I shifted careers to textiles in the 90s, and I dye in a combination of metric and grains, but I weave in inches and yards. I guess I pretty much just picked up whatever was handy and learned my crafts in whatever system they were being taught in. I’m fast with math though, and numbers never have confused me.

I found myself finally switching to mm over inches when i wanted to make small PC enclosures, which are usually also compared to each other in Liters volume, and it is incredibly easy to figure out the volume in liters of a box by taking the 3 sides in mm and just multiplying them together, but trying to find cubic inches and converting was much more difficult. Now i just do everything in mm instead of inches.

I was lucky enough to be taught on Imperial and Metric at school in the 70's due to the change over here in the UK.

I have always used metric and am entirely comfortable with it ... but I taught myself all the most common imperial fractional sizes in metric so when I'm measuring a part I can quickly realise if that part is imperial or not. E.g. if something measures very close to 22.225mm it is actually 7/8" inch ... and when you realise that you start to see patterns. Like if you multiply 22.225(0.875") X 2 you get 44.45 or 1 3/4" (1.750”)inch

I struggle to visualise and work with imperial. I was taught both at school here in the UK but gravitated towards metric. I find metric easier to work with, much easier to do small measurements with and as the scientific and electronics worlds uses metric then I stick with that. Base 10 counting is more natural to me than fractional.

Imperial vs Metric is an interesting question. I am 95% on the opposite side of creating; I either am checking things per tolerance to a production drawing- of which I have no choice of unit of measurement- or, I am working on an (typically ancient) automobile, usually for recreation and sometimes for needed repair. When I do have to create something, a bracket or ball end, or something, I use the convention the rest of the system is in. I definitely _think_ in Imperial, but with a huge caveat professionally- not in fractional expression, instead in the decimal equivalent. When I measure I am usually looking for +/- ,005". so in thousandths anyway...not much mental gymnastics vs metric there in terms of use (not distance). So I will first grab a half-nine wrench (1/2" on one side, 9/16" on the other, it's a common "US old car" tool) *BUT* I will many times grab a 13mm and 14mm wrench instead, depending if my experience with say, _this_ half inch bolt is in a spot that's a pain to get a 1/2 on so I use the 13mm, or _that_ 9/16 looks like it may strip, I'll hedge my bet with a 14mm, 99 times out of 100, that 14mm works like a charm on 9/16 for old US cars with less chance of rounding a hex corner. So while it depends on what I'm doing (and who made it) I'll use metric tools on cars that have no metric hardware! When you need it, it doesn't matter the measuring convention when it works.

Nice discussion about the drill press and mill. As for imperial vs metric; grew up with imperial (USA), but work in healthcare, so also know a lot of metric since that's the standard. And as an added bonus use 24 hour clock - so much better (to me) once I got used to it!

My country (Australia) gave up feet and inches when I was about 8 years old. I threw away my 12” ruler and bought a 30cm ruler. I remember my school teacher telling inches were gone. At 16 I went to work in a engineering factory where they had converted some of the designs into metric. Most of the machines were still graduated in inches. Many designs were written in metric but had just been converted (butchered) into metric so the inch sizes were still there in brackets. Thus fulfilling some government requirement. So I got to learn to work in some kind of inches/metric hell many years after we were supposed to have changed over. 25.4 was my friend. I’m now 60 years old and my milling machine is metric and my lathe is imperial. I often find my home projects still incorporate both systems due to the materials I have available or simply the things I’m trying to fix and where or when they were made. I’m sure similar problems exist in USA, Liberia, and Myanmar. The last three countries in the works still officially using feet and inches. You still have changing to look forward to.

At my old job at [unnamed paint company], we also did an odd imperial-to-metric scaling. If we wanted to make a lab batch of paint, we'd have the software print out a recipe for a "4X" batch, which makes 400 gallons. If it said to add 23 pounds of an ingredient, we'd use 23 grams. With about 453.6 grams to a pound, this would fit comfortably in a 1-gallon can.

I grew up in the US using imperial but did learn metric a little in school. I also grew up on the Canadian border so that helped with metric. Joining the Army moved me a little more into the metric camp. There is a mix in the Army of both. I then went to Germany with the Army and that moved me even further to the side of metric. I then left the Army and stayed in Germany. I've been in Germany half my life as of now(25 years, I'm 50) and I tend to have more problems speaking with family and friends and trying to use imperial again. Sorry but metric just makes more sense and is much simpler in my opinion. I do not think switching is hard at all. When you commit to it, it will take about a year to feel really comfortable with it.

Doesn’t get anymore Savage than this 🤘

20 years in Structural building engineering, always in metric, imperial is a real pain in the a$$.

I was in school when we went metric, so learned both, then I worked for several years transposing old records that were imperial, into metric as we redrew the utility maps, after that a lot of the simple translations are still in my head, but I work with whatever is most conveniant, for smaller measurements its mm, when I get larger I move to inches, and then its back to metres, so its what you learned and what you became accustomed to.

For interior design, a module of 80” is pretty close to 2 meters, a good approximation of overhead reach (if you’re 5’4” tall, lol) and it’s also 5*16” so you can build to this measurement pretty easily with studs on standard 16” centers and 4’x8’ panels

I use both, as a matter of scale. Anything under a meter I use Imperial, over I use Metric. Yards and Meters is the only "close enough", that's why it's the exchange point.

I teach engineering courses in a USA high school. I teach both metric and imperial. But I do emphasize metric. One, it is easier to convert from one unit to another. Two, I find that our kids don't even know the imperial system well. So, this becomes a opportunity to teach/learn the metric system (which I believe should have been the standard long ago) and relate that to the imperial system that many of our kids continue to struggle with.

Yes, Klausing made a drill press, I used to have one. It was old in the '70s when I got it in a trade for a Tektronix Oscilloscope. I had to leave it behind when I moved after being divorced. It was a monster, I had to take it apart to move it into pieces, even when I was young and strong.

One thing that's stuck with me ever since hearing it is something Shane from Stuff Made Here once said. Roughly paraphrased, it was: "A basic band saw, drill press, and belt sander are really all you need. With just those three tools, you can make almost anything."

Woodworker here... Moving from imperial to metric is far easier if instead of using meters, centimeters, and millimeters we use only millimeters. Using mm is Sketchup has saved me tons of time with initial design and probably even more by reducing the errors that result in compounding errors of doing math with fractional measurements i.e. making 5 drawers each are 10 11/64" wide. That converts to 258.36mm. For this application I can just use 258.5mm, far easier to multiply and check my math before I build 5 drawers. For woodworking, I only needed a $12 metric tape measure and a digital caliper that can be switched between imperial and metric.

Interestingly enough the whole learning in imperial and changing to metric was something that happened to my parents generation in Australia, and by way of that to a lesser extent my generation as I was taught metric in school but needed to be able to speak imperial to my parents as an interpreter of sorts.

Although a lot of thing in the UK were metric from either the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century (like BA treads based on 0BA that is 6mm x 1mm), the real change came with the Weights and Measures Act 1963. Around 1965, implementation got really serious and schools and industrial training boards were heavily involved in changing the habits of the entire nation. Certainly in Scottish education in the mid 60s, when I was at primary school, everything became orientated toward SI Units. At 11 years old I could probably have told you the definitions of most of the SI Base Units (Nerd!). So everyone here who is 65 to 70 years old now almost certainly began their formal education with imperial and lots of fraction and the switched to SI and lots of decimals. So we are a classic example of what you mention in the video. Most of us can probably still switch back and fore easily to this day. In my nerdy engineer case, I can take that to extremes but let's not get too boring. My father, educated in the 1920s and 30s, completely in imperial, loved metric, based largely on his experiences in WW2. So when metrication came along in the 1960s he was right into it and was on the local metrication committee of the Construction Industry Training Board. Many of his generation who were not regularly involved with industrial measurement really struggled though. The continued use of imperial units in the UK is quite superficial and anything of consequence is underpinned by metric measure. MPH speed limits and 2.27 litre (4pt) bottles of milk bizarrely live on. I would go so far as to say that generally, very few people in the UK truly understand imperial measurement now. I have a tendency not to trust anything that is measured in pints or feet since I expect it has been done by a person with a poor understanding of measurement.

When I was a teenager, I was an absolutely unrepentant nerd, to the point that I wore a novelty binary-display watch. I only had that watch for about a year (it was cheap and wore out fairly quickly), but it only took me a few months to actually start thinking of time in binary. My first class wasn't at 8:30 AM, it was at 01000:011110 AM. And I wasn't even _trying_ to do that, I only bought the watch for the geek cred. It just sort of... happened. It just goes to show that, if you actually use something new on a regular basis, you can learn it pretty quickly.

0:39 Adam as a professional model(er) yes please! Thanks for all of your continued advice and entertainment!

Well, in Europe, almost nobody would ever even think about this question...

Mythbusters is the very reason I (an 25 year old man from Denmark, who grew up watching mythbusters with subtitles). Learned a lot of english, but also learned about feet, inches, miles and so on. So to that, thank you Adam

8:00 minutes in for inches vs cm part

Dear Adam, having been born and raised in the Netherlands makes me a metric kid. In general I would have to say mm and cm are my go to measurements. However, there definitely are circumstances when the imperial system proves its usefulness. 2”x3”s are still 2”x3”s in my book. As are the measurements of malleable fittings, pipe and their derivatives for threaded appendages in almost all water and gas pipe systems. Another circumstance where imperial is very useful, is the measurement for radiuses. Cheerio

I'm an American carpenter who now permanently lives in Australia. In AU they have a unique "system" like the UK. I would describe the construction industry in 1/3rds. The first 1/3rd is true metric dimensions, the 2nd third are true inch dimensions(bright bolts are all inch in a hardware store, galv bolts are metric), the final third are what I call fake metric. These are products that were manufactured in inches, but labeled in mm for the Aussie market. One of the things that confuses people is centimeter. We don't use them. Only the medical system uses centimeter for height. We use mm for fine and m for gross. The best part is communication. You could be on a roof and yell down to the cut man. Cut me a stick 2754( twenty-seven fifty-four). Try that in feet/inch.

For me it's a choice. I like base 12 for things that don't scale a whole lot, meanwhile I like base 10 for standardization of things that scale a lot.

On the topic of working in both imperial and metric, you should check out the world of PCB design. Component footprints are usually specified in millimeters, unless it's a passive component (like a resistor or capacitor) in which case it'll be something like "0603" which means 0.06 inches by 0.03 inches, but be careful because there's also a 0603 metric that's equal to 0201 imperial. Trace widths and spacing are usually specified in "mils" (an industry term meaning 1/1000th of an inch), while board and layer thickness are in millimeters. Best of all, copper thickness is measured in ounces (yeah, go figure - "ounces of copper spread over a 1 foot square area" is implied). Overall board layout and dimensions are designer's choice between millimeters, mils, or inches, and a single board will often mix units for this. It's madness!

I highly recommend the old walker turner 20 inch drill presses (or the old rockwell delta as well)...I got one off of craigslist and cleaned it all up and not only learned all the parts so I understand more how it works, but got a great all metal should work for decades more drill press out of it. I saw two recently on craigslist for really cheap, and those would be great drill presses for someone starting out and needing something solid and dependable (and cheaper than the new ones of the same size which would have way more plastic in them, and likely smaller tables too). Also, drill presses are not designed to do sideways loads, so milling with them, even with an old one is a bad idea. The old walker turners and some of the rockwell delta also come with the big square production drill press tables vs the small round ones. That avoids needing to make a fancy bolt on square drill press table out of wood.

I learned metric at school, but went on to use imperial AND metric as an apprentice welder/fitter. So handy to know that 19mm is 3/4", 1/2" is close to 13mm and so on. 😁

One factor that seems to be generally overlooked in the "imperial vs metric" discussions is that there wasn't just the imperial system. In fact, one anecdotal reason why France introduced the metric system was that even within France there were multiple different "inches" - all of them different to the English one. My father spent his entire working life in the Swedish lumber business and i vividly remember him explaining to me in the early 1960s what a pain it was because when they sold domestic they needed to use the Swedish "verktum" (24.74 mm) but for export (to England) they were forced to use "English tum" (inches, 25.4 mm). The difference is merely 0.66 mm but when calculating volumes it gets cubed (it becomes 8%) so they had to do both. So he welcomed the change to metric in Sweden, even though the stubborn Brits obviously stuck to their archaic ways. At least that way, the difference was obvious unlike the 25.4/24.74 if someone had used the wrong kind of "tum" ruler.

I am almost 50, here in the UK. I use both constantly, I will mix them up to what is easier at that time. I will often give measurements in both. As an example a little while ago I asked someone to cut both a 424 length of wood, and one at 8 inches. I can visualise something at 10 meters and also 5feet ( I know they are not the same length). I do tend to favour metric when it's small enough to start using fractions. But Miles, stone, yards, ounces, is my preference

3D printing and having a Honda as my first car got me into using metric more often. Now a days when trying to estimate the size of something, I usually go by millimeters first. Converting to imperial if needed. But most of the time I'm estimating cause I'm going to 3D model something around that item, and most if not all of the programs I use are metric by default. So it's partially the laziness of switching units, that got me to use metric.

I am 46 and British so whilst I was taught metric almost exclusively in school, my parents grew up almost entirely on Imperial so it was pretty natural that I would get familiar with both. Even now the UK still uses both, miles for travelling distances, litres for fuel, a lot of us still use feet and inches for people's height and stones and pounds for people's weight, even though we use metric for almost all other weights and measures. Beer is still sold in pints as is milk (albeit converted to ml). Personally, I tend towards whatever makes the most sense or is easier to work with at any one times. For example if I am measuring something around the house and it happens to fall exactly on 2 and a half inches, I will go with that, if it fell on the marks for 35mm then fine, that's what I will use. I work as an engineer specialising in lightning protection so I work with a lot of structural drawings and those are almost always in metric no so that is what I work in professionally.

Hi Adam, as a special effects guy here in the uk (make up fx, props, and animatronics) i have been looking for a pocket ref after seeing you with it and explain , we dont find it in hardware shops here but yaaay finaly got my paws on one , found online used but excellent condition for 5 quid !! i have dyscalcula and have problems with conversions , hoping this will de mystify for me . thank you for the channel .

In almost all cases, if you're going to do things in metric you should use millimeters for small/medium scale stuff and meters for room scale or larger. Forget centimeters, they'll just serve to confuse you can cause you to have to carry decimals all over the place when millimeters provide sufficient precision at the integer level for most daily measurements.

Matt, one point to consider is what power do you have available. In my experience most ( not all ) drill presses in the U.S. are 110/120 volt, whereas the milling machines that I have seen were either 240 volt or 3 phase ( 207 or 277 volts ).

I use mm when 3d printing for whatever reason

If you know that you are going to need to mill metal, get a drilling/milling machine. Like A rongfu 45 etc. But If you are going to only drill holes, get a column type drill press like arboga A3008. The feet is also a table. Head stock and the table can be rotated around the column, so the work piece can be on the floor for example. In short: Small work pieces and need to do some milling = bench top millingmachine with long quil travel. Large work pieces and only driling = column drill press. Large parts and need milling also = get both machines. Bench top drilling and milling machine is very good all around machine, if space and budget is limited and one needs to do some milling. If machine is only needed for drilling, then the column type drill press is the best choice.

I lived through Canada's transition and remember both metric and imperial on speed limit signs. Albiet I was young at the time. But my parents used imperial and I learned metric in school and so when cooking with mom, cups were used as that is all the cookbooks used. When working with dad in the shop he would measure in inches and thinking in fractions like 7/16ths to my brain seemed just wrong when you could use decimals... Now I find things are strange I move between the two. For my own clear thinking and measuring it is metric, especially with 3d printers and modelling. Makes the home depot trips interesting as all lumber is Imperial... However room temperature is 72 F for me. My height, weight are 5'10" and 185 lb. It is not natural to use metric for those for me. One area that is changing is with fuel efficiency in cars. I like MPG but I am trying to make the switch to Litres per 100 KM...

Adam used the word "elucidating." That's an underused word, and i love it.

Love the drill press and mill discussion. Your point of "if your wondering get the drill press" is great. If you think you should get something to future proof then you wont likely use it. The metric vs imperial is great. I see imperial only good for approximation with metric for precision. Multiples of 10 are hard to beat.

When building custom kitchen cabinets I wind up using story poles, inches, and millimeters. Inches for sinks, stoves, and dishwashers: millimeters for everything setup on the 32mm system: and the story pole as my checksum for alignment with center of windows.

As an aircraft mechanic, it was always necessary for me to be able to cope with both imperial and metric hardware. As I discovered working on vintage aircraft, the French complicated things further during the sixties. Metric sizes, but with their own unique thread-pitch.

Sure would be nice if you guys could use the "chapters" feature by listing the timestamps of the individual questions Adam answers in the video description.

As an engineer, a lot of things are in metric (though our engineering drawings for our products are in inches for some reason). I am generally pretty ok with lengths but I find I need to convert C to F when dealing with temperatures in order to get a proper reference on how hot something is.

The key to success when trying to change over from one form of measurement to another is to have an easy form of reference. Once you can eyeball a centimeter or millimeter, for instance when trying to switch to metric, you will find the process gets much easier. Due to 3D printing, I've got millimeters down. This means that I can get to just about every other scale of metric measurement fairly easy. And other than for temperature, I find its use to be far superior for my needs.

Adam, the neat byproduct of measuring in inches and modeling in millimeters, is retaining a 1:1 relationship. (as compelling as 1/25.4th scale is!) No math required! Fewer chances for mistakes, and easy to scale from the model to find a dimension you want.

Both systems have their industries and best applications, at least in US/Canada. I could never build a house using the metric system but it certainly makes sense in science.

I did everything in imperial until I started doing woodworking and then - being absolutely useless at fractions - I decided I would start working in millimetres cos then calculations are so simple that even I can do them. Now I use metric for most things cos it's so much easier and regular.

Maybe I'm just weird, but I switch between both freedom units and metric. Both have their uses. It can get kinda confusing but depending on the project, I will decide which one. Sometimes I even use both in the same project. Lol. Like I said, It can get confusing but it works . 😊

when getting a drill press its best to get a floor mounted one, by the time you add vices and tooling along with the drill bits you can run out of height for the work piece very quick most drill press bearings are only made to work in the downward pressure, trying to use one like a mill with side ways pressure will wear out the bearings in the wrong way

The metric system ruined my life.

I learned using metric system and one of the advantages, I think, is that you only need to divide or multiply by 10. In imperial system you have 1 mile = 1760 yards, 1 yard = 3 feet 1 foot=12 inches. To translate a mile into inches in your head you need to 1760*3*12. Probably just a question of remembering, rather then calculating though. Now traditionally some things are measured in imperial units. The threads for pipes are often in inches (G1/2, G3/4 etc.) and I have no problem connecting them with millimeters. But if you start talking mass in ounces, or density in slug/ft3, I would need to check how much it is by checking conversion factors and doing calculations.

I heard the guys with small ones tend to use centimetres 😃

The Powermatic thing is like a stick welder, your best bet is buying a used Lincoln Tombstone. Minor note: a lot of the good used tool deals seem to have migrated away from Craigslist to Facebook Marketplace. I don't have an account, so I had to get my brother (who does) to tell me about a Lincoln welder popping up for sale.

In the UK we constantly switch back and forth between imperial and metric, depending on the job.

I use metric and English interchangeably, often in the same project. When talking about linear measurements a lot of times english is better because it divides cleaner. Theyre just numbers with units next to them.

My education was in both imperial and metric, my apprenticeship was both plus SI units so living in the UK - I can say without fear of contradiction I am fully ‘metric’ - I am also 6ft 1” tall, 14 st 6Ibs, I drive at 70 mph on the motorway and buy my fuel in litres and work out my average fuel consumption in miles per gallon.

I recently moved and needed some work done on the soffits of my home before selling. My neighbor is a roofer and after some needling from my wife I asked for help. He was kind enough to do what would likely have cost me at least a thousand dollars in exchange for a solid old table saw and a grill. He and his brother grew up in Mexico and as a science teacher I was curious. "I see you're using inches, didn't you use metric in Mexico?" His response wasn't surprising but it was interesting "Yeah, but everything you see here is sold in inches, it's easier just to use those"

I grew up in the 70's and 80's. Once the motor industry switched to metric, I have never looked back. My old cars still have standard engine parts, but mostly everything you buy now is metric. In fact, I have an A body Olds that is half metric and half standard.. one step before the Gbody, that was the first GM platform that was full metric.

as somebody who grew up with metric system i'm all for it and could not imagine using imperial units. but one of its flaws is that while you know 10 mm is a cm, and 10 cm is a dm, and 10 dm is a M etc, you'd always need a measuring tool. for fine machining i could see metric being superior, but for carpentry i could possibly see imperial being more effective. i could see myself being wrong in this assumption since i do not use imperial units, but inches and feet are somewhat related to bodymeasurements, right, so i view it as a accuracy vs convenience thing (which becomes an invalid statement the moment you bring up something that perfectly measures inches)

I use both as ne essary but I prefer imperial or whatever the traditional measure/unit is for the activity i'm doing because it usually is in a natural fit for that specific task. And honestly most of the time I don't measure in units, I measure with with story sticks/story tape to get an exact size or use string or something else & bend/fold into whatever divisions i need. Super accurate & quick & i basically never need calculations, big disadvantage is passing the project off to someone else.

the whole inch vs metric thing is fun, I'm an engineer in the states and grew up on imperial, these days though my comfort level changes with scale. below 0.1in I'm more comfortable with "thou" (0.001in) from there up until 1 meter or so I'm bilingual but prefer metric (especially with fasteners). once things get past 1m i still have a good sense for both but prefer feet. after about 100 feet though my sense for metric goes out the window and I only have a good sense for yards and miles.

I prefer to work in centimeters, but I wind up working in inches simply because in the US it's difficult and expensive to get metric materials. I can buy 5/16" bolts by the pound at Tractor Supply, but 8mm bolts (almost exactly the same thing) are $1.50 each in a little plastic bag in drawers at Lowes. All the secondhand lathes and such are set up in inches, you you can't really do things like single point threading a metric thread unless you get a conversion gearset, which for old lathes is almost impossible to find.

On mill Vs. Drill press, it depends what you are doing with it. A mill vice can be very useful for precision work. Back in the 80's used one all the time to drill holes and mill out copper on copper clad board for circuit boards. It was time consuming, but made nice looking boards for prototyping. One turn for 1/10 inch made things really easy for DIP packages and other through-hole parts. On Inches Vs. Centimeters, Inches I find Inches to be an easier to use system for building things. Fractions make it really easy to half a measurement, and for precision work we switch to mil, thousandths of an inch. Over all I find that people that understand US Customary units have no trouble at all using Metric and can switch between and convert between them with little trouble, where as metric folk can't ever seem to be able to get their head around fractional units.

I loved the metric/imperial question and would love to know... are there people out there who have switched from metric to imperial measurements and why?

Thanks for the proclivity, will be entering my lexicon.

The metric system of measurement is based on the speed of light, or how much distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

As an Australian we made the switch and never looked back

The 2/3 axis "milling vise" on a drill press isn't all bad as long as it's not used for "milling". They're great for doing positioning of a piece for drilling multiple holes without having to re-clamp the piece... but agreed, "milling" with it is not recommended.

An x-y table for under a drill press is no good do acute milling, but for drilling it can be useful, to acutely drill a set distance from somewhere else

Interesting question about measurement units. I work on electron microscopes for my day-job and the moving parts and metrology sections are all calibrated in metric units. The vacuum systems however, are all recorded in imperial units (milli-bar) which strikes me as bizarre but apparently that's the convention (although one can switch to Pascals or Torr if required). Had to wrap my brain around measuring something down to the nanometer scale and report the vacuum pressure at 1 x 10 (-10) mBar vacuum..

I kind of love the cursed 1 : 25.4 model scaling. I also hate it because of CAD.

I grew up in the USA, but moved back to the UK when I was age 6 or 7 (I do not remember), so i had to learn ft/inches at school in the USA, then re-learn and use metric in the UK.

I only do scale modeling, but as an American I always work in metric because I'm absolutely terrible at fractions. Not to the point where I would pass up a third-pounder cheeseburger, but to the point where I haven't a clue what 7/8 of an inch is and how it relates to 3/4 of an inch.

I have always liked the concept of a story stick. I just imagin back in ye old days a rack with what looks like a bunch various sticks. Some one wants a couple of chairs and you go thats a number 12. Your assistant goes through the sticks till he finds #12.

Im 26 and in the uk so i grew up with metric. However whenever i do projects with my dad he uses imperial. I now find myself using imperial for larger measurements and metric for smaller ones, i wont go below 1/4inch as i find it harder to figure out than saying something like 2mm.

Always used cm when machining or building as it shigher resolution allows for much better accuracy. Even when using fractions of inches simply because when communicating measurements across departments, over phone calls etc saying "1mm" (or less) is less likely to get misheard than 3/64's of an inch. Even worse then working to tighter tolerances.

I work in video games and game engines tend to operate in metric because the math is easier. I also worked in construction so I got really used to imperial for building stuff. Usually for me it's a matter of scale now. I find metric easier to describe really small stuff like 3d printing

In school I used metric for everything and I intentionally have done all my maker work in metric. Still it can be hard/impossible to find the things I need in metric in the states (and vise versa). Add too add to that metric goods often cost more. Lastly I grew up using inches. The net result is that I use both systems regularly and convert regularly between them.

Having lived in the U.S. my whole life I grew up using English units. After completing several courses in mechanical and aerospace engineering, I much prefer using metric when doing calculations.

Made me really consider how I mix units. I default to 'understanding' (i.e. how things feel) in imperial, but I usually design in metric, unless client needs imperial. But when I'm making things myself, sets, equipment, and the like, I go with whichever units best fit the circumstances and mix imperial and metric too. Heads are strange places 😁😎

I use metric when dealing with very small things as its easier to visualize millimeters and centimeters. Anything larger, i go with imperial as inches, feet, etc are easier to visualize.

About inches, I always marvel at the audacity of major software companies who make Inches their default measurement system. There are more than 20 times as many people using metric measurements as there are using imperial units.

I did school in inches and lbs but am now converted to metrics because everything in New Zealand is metric. Occasionally I go back to imperial because boats are still imperial in distance so fuel consumption etc is easier that way although I do go liters per nautical mile

Of course its a habit. Your most comfortable with the system you have an intuitive understanding of. That said the simplistically of the metric system is hard to argue with. Especially when we start messuring volumes. I can easily do m3 to dm3 conversations in my head suspect most imperial users would have it a bit harder.

I'm from the UK and was taught the metric system all through school. However, I use alot of imperial measurements as do quite a few people here purely because alot of the imperial system is still used or was up to recently. Road signs are in miles and weight was normally (till about a decade or so ago) in lbs/ounces. It's strange because the UK officially changed to the metric system in the early 70s! I use both to be fair depending on the scale of the job

Gosh I love that janky 1/25-ish scale conversion. Though to be fair the only time I think of an inch as 2.51cm rather than 2.5 is in the context of electronics pin spacing, because really long Soviet chips (2.5mm pin spacing) can get totally out of phase with a Western socket (2.51mm pin spacing) after about ~20 pins long, and it’s a bit of an awkward fit after ~10. But 4, 6 and 8 pin long chips will usually just about work without hassle. Edit: or is it 2.54? See, I hardly use it.

On the Drill Press vs Mill question, I'm not by any means an expert but from what I've seen online it seems like a decent press and decent mill are in entirely different price brackets and weight classes. My gut would be that really if you only feel the actual "need" for a good drill press, then it'd be best to stick with that because a decent mill will be far more expensive and difficult to deal with. Though this does open up another question that I'm curious about and if Adam has experience with smaller hobbyist CNC mills that have been all over the market recently and some of the open source designs that exist as well.