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Sorry, I dabble with woodworking and disagree heavily. I usually don't care for bigger precision than 1mm (so between 1/16" and 1/32"), and adding things up is
by bialpio 3y ago
Sorry, I dabble with woodworking and disagree heavily. I usually don't care for bigger precision than 1mm (so between 1/16" and 1/32"), and adding things up is a nightmare ("umm... 7 3/16" + 2 1/8" + 5 1/4" is... where's a goddamn pen & paper..."). Same with figuring out which line is which fraction of an inch on measuring tools. Things became tolerable once I got metric measuring tape.
- foobarian 3y agoOnce you get past the dabbling stage it starts to get pretty natural. I don't think either system is better, the value is mostly tied up with what's on the shelves at the local home center and how your measuring tools are marked.
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoThe stuff on the shelves is rarely sized precisely enough for the units to matter. I've bought 1/4" ply that measured much closer to 6.0 mm than to 1/4".
- bialpio 3y agoIt's already natural when using metric, so I'll stick to it.
- jjoonathan 3y agoSure, if tools are dirt cheap you can just sacrifice to Benford's Law and use base 10. If tools are not cheap, you'll learn to use base 2, one way or another.
- bialpio 3y agoI doubt I'll ever be able to quickly add fractions in base-2 (it doesn't happen often enough to train this), so pen+paper will always be a necessity if I wanted to stick to imperial. I could see getting the intuition for "which line is the eights vs sixteenths" over time though, but if the one-off calculations are going to be such a pain, I don't really see a point.