Share Pics of People Hauling or Towing Something Wrong

[bcp]

The US should have dropped the Imperial system soon after we dropped out of the Empire.

Bruce

 

[Too many Kubotas]

Thats cheating... putting an American backhoe on a German Unimog and then complaining that the fastener standards are all over the place

Umm...I'm not complaining about the SAE fasteners. It's all that metric crap on them that I don't care for.

 

[Jstpssng]

I mean, the longer the US postpones the inevitable, the longer you will have the problem of requiring double tool sets

Nah, we're just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up!

 

[Renze]

The US should have dropped the Imperial system soon after we dropped out of the Empire.

That was.. let me Google it.. 4th of July, 1776.
The French revolutionary government initialized a decimal measurement system in 1792 and in 1799 the meter and kilogram were standardised. You can hate dictators but Napoleon instigated the metric system and the man with the funny moustache (his name is censored here) wanted the modern highway being built....

So had the US done that, they would have been where Europe was at that time: every major city had its own unit of weight and distance, making trade of pounds of beef for grams of gold, very difficult.

 

[LouNY]

We dont have that problem anymore, because the British stopped using it in the 60s.... and they werent exactly building good stuff, its just that MGs and Landrovers get romanticized so much that some folks will do anything to keep them around: even buying an imperial socket set

I mean, the longer the US postpones the inevitable, the longer you will have the problem of requiring double tool sets.

Imperial forever, screw the damned metrics.

 

[BigBlue1]

I've never understood the angst at having imperial and metric co-exist. I'm over 50 and have been dealing with both for most of my life. I bought a good set of tools with both sizings back in the 90's and they have served me well. It's not that hard to discern whether a vehicle/machine's fasteners will be one or the other. The only thing I'd prefer to be unified is threads because that relates to needing essentially duplicate supplies on hand.

At this point I just want the US system to persist forever simply as a means to pi$$ folks off.

 

[Eagle1]

I've never understood the angst at having imperial and metric co-exist. I'm over 50 and have been dealing with both for most of my life. I bought a good set of tools with both sizings back in the 90's and they have served me well. It's not that hard to discern whether a vehicle/machine's fasteners will be one or the other. The only thing I'd prefer to be unified is threads because that relates to needing essentially duplicate supplies on hand.

At this point I just want the US system to persist forever simply as a means to pi$$ folks off.

True but being a MOPAR guy, I have my share of vehicles that use a mixture of fasteners, and it's not consistent per model. I'm used to it and use what ever fits best.

 

[LouNY]

My first unexpected metric was quite a few years (decades) ago when I was wrenching on a GM car to remove the transmission and the torque converter to flex plate bolts were metric.
I had and had used metric wrench for several years before that on imported equipment and motorcycles but not on GM vehicles.

 

[WinterDeere]

I've never understood the angst at having imperial and metric co-exist. I'm over 50 and have been dealing with both for most of my life. I bought a good set of tools with both sizings back in the 90's and they have served me well. It's not that hard to discern whether a vehicle/machine's fasteners will be one or the other. The only thing I'd prefer to be unified is threads because that relates to needing essentially duplicate supplies on hand.

At this point I just want the US system to persist forever simply as a means to pi$$ folks off.

Likewise, I've dealt with both my whole life. Not a huge deal, but it would be more convenient to just have one. Especially when I was young and just building up my mechanic's tool sets, buying two of everything (long and shorts in every drive size, times two for metric & imperial!) is kind of a drag.

I design product that needs to be mounted in customer's equipment, and our internal standard is all Imperial. Our mounting holes are usually also tapped imperial, but now I have to do special metric variants for some Euro and Asian customers, with Imperial internal hardware but Metric tapped mounting holes.

My Kawasaki V-twin motor is a similar mess. Most of the hardware is metric (Iso), but several of the tapped holes on the rear crank case (muffler mounting, PTO mounting, etc.) are all 3/8" NC. Go figure.

 

[John0829]

I can well remember when the convert to metric thing first started and I stated I would hang up my wrenches when I had to start buying metrics. Well here we are 60 years later and I have as many or more metric than I do SAE and for the most part I can now look at a bolt/nut and know what to grab.

I do agree it is a PIA when metric and SAE are mixed together on the same application.