Thread: Seating depth - who bothers?

interesting.sooooo much to learn about reloading

Originally Posted by Cyclist

NZ went metric in 1976 as far as I know? Are people REALLY measuring everything in inches or just saying what they hear on US forums?

Ive never caught a 4.6kg trout, I still stand 6'1" in my socks and prefer it if you're pouring from a 40oz bottle.

Originally Posted by Cyclist

"the Speights school of advanced ballistic research"

I always recon the whole "few thou" or "40 thou" thing is interesting, NZ went metric in 1976 as far as I know? Are people REALLY measuring everything in inches or just saying what they hear on US forums?

Cyclist
As an engineer who has lived through the imperial/metric swap over I find myself stuck between two worlds.

I'm completely at home with inches/mm PSI/Bar FtLbs/Nm etc ... lots of toolroom machinery in NZ especially lathes/mills and surface grinders are still calibrated in inches, some of the older press tooling and injection dies were manufactured to imperial drawings and when they need repair you work from those drawings.
We still stock metric and impreial drills, Taps, dies, cutters, dowels, cap screws etc.

When it comes to money however I'm lost in the imperial world and think only in metric .... I guess thats because my first pay packet was in dollars and cents and has been ever since.

You can still by bar stock, bearings and seals in both imperial & metric sizes.

When measuring with a Very Near I still read off the imperial scale first and have both imperial and metric micrometers in my tool box and use which ever is appropriate to what ever the scale is calibrated in the machine I'm using at the time.

So to answer your question, Yes some people still work and measure in the imperial scale.

Cheers
Pete

Yep - but I never heard anybody talking about thou till reloading? small stuff on engines like valve clearances, bearing crush, points etc is metric (or at least I always did it in metric...) the lathe is metric, the mill is metric. I cant think of any other area where small measurements are commonly made in thou off the top of my head??

Hmm - post appears above as im slowly typing... So engineers are still using it which is interesting. Still there are plenty of posts from people who are obviously not engineers and are far too young to know what the other side of the ruler is for. Tis a funny old world!

I built all motors in thou at the shop

Originally Posted by kiwijames

Ive never caught a 4.6kg trout, I still stand 6'1" in my socks and prefer it if you're pouring from a 40oz bottle.

Especially if it's a single malt

Time's have changed then becuase we have bead callipers from italy that measure down to 0.01mm only still in mills, i guess in imperial you can go a little less and give it a number its only alloy joinery so we dont need thou's

Originally Posted by Spanners

I built all motors in thou at the shop

why though? is it what you learnt from the old man or are they teaching it at tech?

I guess I just got it all in metric from the old boy and thats what we did - he would have been firmly from the Whitworth and Long Tons days!

Originally Posted by Neckshot

Time's have changed then becuase we have bead callipers from italy that measure down to 0.01mm only still in mills, i guess in imperial you can go a little less and give it a number its only alloy joinery so we dont need thou's

0.01mm is less than 1/2 a thou (0.000394") so you're pretty tight tolerance there anyway.

A tho of an inch is bigger than 0.01mm

That's just how you do it lol
Engineering is different. You USE it daily. A normal world person prob wouldn't

We rebuild a bunch of American and English equipment where the manual specs are imperial (thou). Getting less and less now though.

1 Thou is 0.025mm approx

The best one i have heard of is the "Mars climate orbiter" project which crashed and burnt - it was a joint project and one team was using metric, the other team imperial, neither bothered to check the other teams numbers... oops!

in that case we use small incriments but we only use metric to do it if thats the pointim no genius