5 ms·
I hear this a lot as an abstract statement but can you give a real world example of where you personally have used that fact? I've struggled to think of any way
by exporectomy 6y ago
I hear this a lot as an abstract statement but can you give a real world example of where you personally have used that fact? I've struggled to think of any way it would be useful. Dividing by 2 is useful for finding a center, but obviously you can do that just as easily in metric.
- thih9 6y agoWoodworking could be a mix of divisibility and industry specific product sizing. Dividing a 2" by 4" into pieces seems easier than dividing a 50.8 mm × 101.6 mm.
- klik99 6y agoExcept a 2"x4" is actually a 1.5"x3.5" [edit] I have no skin in this game - I grew up in England and America and literally don't care - just pointing out how weird the "2 by 4" terminology is
- goodcanadian 6y agoMy understanding was that those were meant to be the dimensions prior to planing . . .
- mnw21cam 6y agoAgreed, but that's a heck of a margin to plane off.
- nicwolff 6y agoThe board is 2"x4" before drying; after drying it will usually have cupped and twisted slightly, so the planing really is bringing the sides back into plane, which takes more removal than if it were just to smooth them.
- exporectomy 6y agoYou mean the advantage is in the fact that materials come in convenient imperial measurements? In metric countries, they come in convenient metric sizes too, so that's no real advantage when everyone else cooperates. Obviously, nobody uses 50.8 x 101.6 mm timber unless they've converted from inches, so without inches, it wouldn't exist. The advantage I'm talking about is what comes from having 12 inches in a foot. If you're only using inches and not feet then there's obviously no advantage from that.
- Waterluvian 6y agoBuilt a deck and was doing a ton of dividing to break my 8' and 12' boards down to the hundreds of smaller pieces I needed for stairs, railings, etc. It probably helped that I controlled the constraints so I could use nice whole numbers. You certainly might have a point. I might just be noticing the "romantic" feeling for how clean it all seemed to be.
- exporectomy 6y agoCan you be more specific? I can't imagine needing to cut a longer piece into a known number of smaller pieces, rather than smaller pieces of a known size. Even if you do, won't the nice numbers be lost by having to account for kerf width? I've also built a deck and choosing the quantity of material to buy probably involved some dividing to see how many pieces I can get from a big one. But I would add a rough estimate for kerf width and length error. Dividing metric materials is often easy because they're sized in easily divisible numbers like 2.4, 3.6, or 4.8 m.