Date:         Thu, 2 Feb 2006 06:54:22 -0800
Reply-To:     Jeffrey Earl <jefferrata@YAHOO.COM>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Jeffrey Earl <jefferrata@YAHOO.COM>
Subject:      Metric this, metric that
Comments: To: Kjmmensing@AOL.COM, crescentbeachguitar@GMAIL.COM
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

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 ..."

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