Seriously? You Have To Provide Your Own Water Bottle For The Windshield Washer?

[wheaters]

The UK is a very strange place as while you do use metric for many things you still use imperial gallons and miles instead of liters and kilometers.

Make up your minds already!

No, we use litres when we buy fuel. We only quote miles per gallon to confuse the USA, especially as we use gallons with about a pint more than yours. The exact quantity is a trade secret!

My old school exercise books had conversion tables on the rear cover. Measurements of distance such as rods, perches, chains, yards, furlongs, miles etc were all there!

Then we changed from pounds, shillings and pence to decimal currency in 1971, when I was 15 years old. I used to deliver newspapers and had to collect the money on Saturdays. I was taking in the old money and having to give change in decimal coins. One old lady told me "This will never catch on round here, you know!" But it did.

At work I deal with nautical miles but the official charts are laid out with an overlay of kilometre grids. The fuel leaves the bowser in litres but my aircraft gauges are in kilograms.
The airborne time is shown in minutes but the maintenance organisation wants the time recorded as decimal hours.
To make things even more complicated our altimeters are set using a millibar scale but the authorities have recently decided that we need to call them Hectopascals instead. It's the same thing! Unfortunately an American pilot got it wrong and took the Hectopascal figure given to him by ATC to be inches of mercury instead. Which made his altimeter read six hundred feet too high. So now, every time the pressure is less than 1,000 Hectopascals we have to read back the word Hectopascals when ATC give us their setting. Presumably to stop him doing it again. You'd think he would have learned his lesson by now.

I cope with all these but the one thing I do worry about is that my torque wrenches in the garage read in Newton Metres but I need to tighten stuff up to foot pounds.

 

[wheaters]

The beauty is that you put your own bottle in it. If necessary drill a hole in the cap and insert the tube. You seem to be quite capable of making any necessary adaptations

Jim....it's a joke

 

[Jim H]

Lived in the UK (Bury St Edmunds) for 2 years and never learned to understand British humor.

 

[wheaters]

It's an American joke!

I was just going along with it.

British humour? Just think the opposite of what's being said.

 

[goofyone]

No, we use litres when we buy fuel. We only quote miles per gallon to confuse the USA, especially as we use gallons with about a pint more than yours. The exact quantity is a trade secret!

My old school exercise books had conversion tables on the rear cover. Measurements of distance such as rods, perches, chains, yards, furlongs, miles etc were all there!

Then we changed from pounds, shillings and pence to decimal currency in 1971, when I was 15 years old. I used to deliver newspapers and had to collect the money on Saturdays. I was taking in the old money and having to give change in decimal coins. One old lady told me "This will never catch on round here, you know!" But it did.

At work I deal with nautical miles but the official charts are laid out with an overlay of kilometre grids. The fuel leaves the bowser in litres but my aircraft gauges are in kilograms.
The airborne time is shown in minutes but the maintenance organisation wants the time recorded as decimal hours.
To make things even more complicated our altimeters are set using a millibar scale but the authorities have recently decided that we need to call them Hectopascals instead. It's the same thing! Unfortunately an American pilot got it wrong and took the Hectopascal figure given to him by ATC to be inches of mercury instead. Which made his altimeter read six hundred feet too high. So now, every time the pressure is less than 1,000 Hectopascals we have to read back the word Hectopascals when ATC give us their setting. Presumably to stop him doing it again. You'd think he would have learned his lesson by now.

I cope with all these but the one thing I do worry about is that my torque wrenches in the garage read in Newton Metres but I need to tighten stuff up to foot pounds.

LOL, sounds about as bad as being an engineer in the US. In our universities engineers, along with all other science and applied science fields, are instructed using the metric system. However if/when we leave the academic arena we rapidly discover that industry in the US is a huge mess frequently mixing both metric and imperial measurements which creates many similar examples to the ones you noted in your job as helicopter pilot.

 

[Lil4X]

I was in and out of Malta about the time the currency conversion took place there. I still have some of the old shillings and pence. A week after the conversion was official, shops in Valetta were being required to make change in "new P", but shortages and public outcry kinda screwed up the monetary system for a few months. Everyone was working pencils down to the nub trying to convert "old P into "new P" longhand. If that wasn't confusing enough most of Europe going from Francs, Pesetas, Lira, D-Marks, and Drachs to Euros several years later. Ouch! Over there weeks after the conversion, I would still hear locals say to shopkeepers, "how much is that in REAL money?"

The Maltese took it on the chin, going from their old Sterling coinage to the "New" decimal system, then to their own Maltese Lira, now to the Euro. There have to be heads spinning over there. Just wait until Norway and the UK and a few remaining holdouts convert. That's going to be painful - if it ever happens. I'm sorta on their side, why fix what ain't broke? Just as I was getting comfortable with Sterling and Krone . . .

Don't even ask what the Elio will sell for in Europe. That's going to be a toss-up by 2016 - worse by 2020. If you're Greek, you probably can't afford one . . . .

 

[Jambe]

So, will the Elio be totally metric?

 

[goofyone]

I was in and out of Malta about the time the currency conversion took place there. I still have some of the old shillings and pence. A week after the conversion was official, shops in Valetta were being required to make change in "new P", but shortages and public outcry kinda screwed up the monetary system for a few months. Everyone was working pencils down to the nub trying to convert "old P into "new P" longhand. If that wasn't confusing enough most of Europe going from Francs, Pesetas, Lira, D-Marks, and Drachs to Euros several years later. Ouch! Over there weeks after the conversion, I would still hear locals say to shopkeepers, "how much is that in REAL money?"

The Maltese took it on the chin, going from their old Sterling coinage to the "New" decimal system, then to their own Maltese Lira, now to the Euro. There have to be heads spinning over there. Just wait until Norway and the UK and a few remaining holdouts convert. That's going to be painful - if it ever happens. I'm sorta on their side, why fix what ain't broke? Just as I was getting comfortable with Sterling and Krone . . .

Don't even ask what the Elio will sell for in Europe. That's going to be a toss-up by 2016 - worse by 2020. If you're Greek, you probably can't afford one . . . .

Fortunately, as I am on the younger end of our memberships age scale, most of my personal and business travel has occurred after the Euro. However I came to appreciate the convenience of the unified currency as one of my jobs had me working across all six inhabited continents (my second and last year of this job I actually took a vacation to Antarctica just so I could manage visiting all seven continents in one year ). Moving and working across Europe was definitely much more convenient without having to deal with currency issues. The unified currency does make business across the region much easier but as the financial crisis demonstrated it definitely has its share of drawbacks.

As a side note I loved my time in Malta and would love to visit again. Lots of history and crystal clear waters made for some nice breaks from working.

 

[AriLea]

So, will the Elio be totally metric?

If they really want to sell internationally, they really should. Most likely the engine will be.

 

[Snick]

Oddly enough, although Japanese and Korean automotive manufacturers bolts, fittings, belt lengths, etcetera are specified in metric measurements, the actual machines, jigs, fixtures, and toolings used to create thos parts are mostly in SAE!

For high precision, high tolerance, high accuracy machining, it's almost always going to be in SAE tooling inputs (with metric or SAE outputs). How's that for ironic?