Thread: Mils and mrads

Originally Posted by grandpamac

Greetings 35whelen,
I got a thorough grounding in UK to metric units in the mid 1970's. I was working as an architectural draughtsman and we were forever converting from feet, inches and fractions of an inch into metres and millimetres. We had a very useful table that helped with this. Affordable pocket calculators were still somewhere in the future. I was still needing to do the conversions from pre 1975 plans right up until I retired in 2015. Worth remembering is that 1 inch is exactly 25.4mm although at one time the UK inch was slightly shorter and the US inch slightly longer. Survey plans were in chains and links which we had to convert into metres, at least this was simpler than feet inches and fractions. Almost all US units were different to the UK ones, just another trap.
Regards Grandpamac.

Thats a bit of a blast from the past

As a schoolboy I remember being a chainman for my godfather, surveying out the new Wellington dump location: having to hold the spring balance to keep the chain at a predetermined tension. I wonder if surveyors these days get shown all this sort of gear, that is really only one-two generations old

Originally Posted by XR500

Thats a bit of a blast from the past

As a schoolboy I remember being a chainman for my godfather, surveying out the new Wellington dump location: having to hold the spring balance to keep the chain at a predetermined tension. I wonder if surveyors these days get shown all this sort of gear, that is really only one-two generations old

Greetings XR500,
Talk about blast from the past. My first job, other than mowing lawns, was a two week stint as a chainman's assistant for the May school holidays about 1964. My father had wangled it for me. The work was plotting the centre line for part of the Napier Hastings Expressway. The surveyors had been through and put in some set out points and we were working between them putting in pegs every chain or so. Wet days were spent making pegs out of the totara beams from the old Mohaka Bridge from the Napier Taupo Road. These were split from sections of beam and then shaped with a very sharp tomahawk. And we think that recycling is something new.
Regards Grandpamac.