Jeff Ensing wrote: >> I carry tape measures with fractional, metric, and engineers scales.
Careful with those. I work for a company whose products are designed stateside and manufactured in Asia. My boss was over in Shanghai one time during the first production run of a new product and casually grabbed a tape measure off a bench to check a critical dimension on a unit as it came down the assembly line. What should have been 18" was something more like 16". The big red button was pressed to bring the entire assembly line to a halt while the matter was investigated. After nearly an hour of head scratching, someone else checked the unit with their own tape measure and found it to be correct. Turns out the first tape measure, like many, had metric increments down one side and English down the other. But the "inches" were in fact something like 1 1/8" long! So a "foot" was about 13 1/2" long, etc.. That tape measure is now prominently displayed in my boss' office as a dark reminder to all our product managers. And of course, we all recall what happened with that Mars orbiter ... http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/
Jeffrey Earl 1983 diesel Westfalia "Vanasazi" http://www.vanthology.com/ "OK, I'll leave it at that since I've already gone on for far too long about something I don't know a whole lot about ..." __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com |
Please note - During the past 17 years of operation, several gigabytes of
Vanagon mail messages have been archived. Searching the entire collection
will take up to five minutes to complete. Please be patient!
Return to the archives @ gerry.vanagon.com
The vanagon mailing list archives are copyright (c) 1994-2011, and may not be reproduced without the express written permission of the list administrators. Posting messages to this mailing list grants a license to the mailing list administrators to reproduce the message in a compilation, either printed or electronic. All compilations will be not-for-profit, with any excess proceeds going to the Vanagon mailing list.
Any profits from list compilations go exclusively towards the management and operation of the Vanagon mailing list and vanagon mailing list web site.