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In my Antique Furniture career I worked on many early French pieces of furniture and was interested to see that the measurements were close to imperial and no metric measurements. As to old money, I am sure that this aided grasping "adding and subtraction" to young minds, wth the times table going up to the 12 X. Woefully lacking in many young people today, who struggle withot a calculator/mobile phone. Having spent a lot of time in recent months sitting on railway platforms, why are the vast majority of passengers gazing at mobile phones?
 
For Clogs and others: "psi"pronounced "sigh" is about the twentieth letter of the classical Greek alphabet. It is an easily calculable measure of the ability of a system, cell, or tissue to take in water. Ask any A level Biology student; they do it as part of osmosis. It applies in kidney dialysis, transfusions, organ transplants - for the latter, look up "Ringer's Solution" or "Physiological Saline"; same difference.
 
J-G said:
π - Ω - λ - δ - Σ are all copied from a .PDF file displayed on screen - the same cannot be done from an Excel spread-sheet or a Word document though.
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There is no problem in copying symbols or any other character from Excel or Word into comments.
 
Tortoise said:
Yes. I have recently worked on an english antique and there, everything is imperial. Reconstructing a piece from fragments and the witness marks on them it's been pleasing to calculate the dimensions of missing parts and find they are all values seen on an imperial ruler.
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It's because imperial measures are literally and metaphorically "handier" i.e. easy to use if you are making stuff and related to the human form - an inch as typical finger joint, foot as foot, yard as stride etc
Tortoise said:
For interest, I can add the dovetail gradient can be different from the modern norm. In particular, the piece has dovetails with a 1 in 3 gradient.
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They vary from 45º (fragile!) to 0º when they become a machine cut box joint. Some idle journalist made up the 1/6 and 1/8 ratios and it's become gospel.
 
Adam W. said:
Someone will probably be along shortly to inform you that you don't need such shiny things.
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I used to use a homemade version which worked ok but what I like about this shinier verson is that you can use it like a large caliper, if you place it into a gap in say a stud wall then you can simply transfer the required width to the mitre saw or onto a length of wood very easily and it saves time walking back and forth with scraps of paper with dimensions scribbled down.

All the symbols you may require are in excel, not the most freindly and the equation editor is even more problematic but works with some patience.

1697970205830.png
 
thanks Spectric.......
wasn't sure if u had to press 3 or 4 keys at the same time to get it........
computors are not my thing.....

the Greek keyboards I have seen use the English letters in the lower corner.....
never thought to see if they are querty or not....
anyway theres an extra button if u want it to write with English letters.......
and the old Greek letters are still used /written to this day....
n u think Doctors scrawl is bad....lol.....
have translate on my phone......
 
paulrbarnard said:
Serious question. Why would you want one marked in 10ths? 1/16ths would be best. If working in decimals then the metric system is the way to go. The whole beauty of imperial is the fact that the fractions divide. Half of a half is a quarter, half of a quarter is an eighth. Half of an eight is 1/16. 12ths would let you measure thirds so that could be useful but less so than halves.
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10ths is an engineering thing, = 100 thou. For most imperial machine tools, 1 tenth is the distance a table or cutter will move with 1 revolution of a control wheel. 10 revolutions of the wheel is 1 inch.

Thousands of an inch are a perfect measurement for machining metals, lathes, milling machines etc. Way better than tiny little useless microns which are too small to be any use to people who aren’t quantum physicists.

Imperial is a far better system in every respect.

And, nobody wants lathes etc in thou any more, so they are really cheap 😎
 
steve355 said:
10ths is an engineering thing, = 100 thou. For most imperial machine tools, 1 tenth is the distance a table or cutter will move with 1 revolution of a control wheel. 10 revolutions of the wheel is 1 inch.

Thousands of an inch are a perfect measurement for machining metals, lathes, milling machines etc. Way better than tiny little useless microns which are too small to be any use to people who aren’t quantum physicists.

Imperial is a far better system in every respect.

And, nobody wants lathes etc in thou any more, so they are really cheap 😎
Click to expand...

You have completely contradicted yourself in your last sentence. 😂 😂
 
XTiffy said:
In my Antique Furniture career I worked on many early French pieces of furniture and was interested to see that the measurements were close to imperial and no metric measurements...
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This makes sense, because until the advent of the metric system, France used the foot (pied) and the inch (pouce). It amused me to discover when learning French that "I have five feet and eight thumbs", which describes me to a T. The French foot was, of course, different from all the other feet that have been used over the years - I read somewhere that over three hundred have been identified.

The French foot was equivalent to 12.79 English inches. Interestingly, the "ligne" (1/12 of a French inch) is still used to measure the size of buttons.

Les

Edit: Just found the quote, from Measurements of Precision by T.C. Mendenhall: "At the close of the last (eighteenth) century, in different parts of the world, the word pound was applied to 391 different units of weight and the word foot to 282 different units of length." Well, I wasn't far out... You can see why an international system was needed.
 
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With regard to the last two posts; I didn't know that! "Give instruction to a wise man and he will be yet wiser" (Was that the intro to all of those "Teach Yourself books?)
 
XTiffy said:
With regard to the last two posts; I didn't know that!
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You would not be expected to unless you had been involved in any of the (few) trades that retain the measure - unless, I suppose, if you had made a study of 'measurement'. It so happens that I qualify on both counts :)

It never ceases to amaze me how some 'knowledgable' people try to obfuscate information in an attempt to create a 'We know and you don't - so for a fee, we'll tell you' - The Ligne is also used in the millinery business; to measure the width of men's hat bands, but they define it at 11.26 to the International Inch which is exactly the same as 12 to the Old French Inch at 2.256mm.
 

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