**** the british gravitational unit system

[tharptroy]

thats right, I ****ing said it. I'm sick and goddamned tired of converting the piss-poor designed british units system ****.

divide (lb*ft)/s by 550 to get horsepower? who comes up with this ****?

12 ****ing inches in a foot? things measured in 1/16 of an inch? give me a ****ing break.

all these goddamned engineering problems asking me to convert back and forth between british and SI units is a fuycking joke.

some asshole is still going to use the wrong units and crash a ****ing space shuttle over this.

they need to make ****ing inches and feet and all of that bull**** illegal.

yoiu foreigners can keep your communist free healthcare, and whatever the hell else you want, but we need a goddamned proper ****ing unit system more than anything else.

drunken saturday night homework rant over

[Munky]

C'mon...tell us how you really feel.

[mbv2001]

awesome..

[Slapshotman7]

You tell those tea sipping bastages!

[vsolo]

It is not the British who is responsible for this. Back in 1975 US law made it mandatory that we change from the British system to the metric system & we would have 10 years to allow everyone to change. :confused:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States

I was all for this seeing the rest of the world was already metric. :cool:

BUT Nooooo.. in the '70 any forward thinking company that went metric lost so bad because most Americans refused to adjust.:headshake Shell was one of them & I have a VW Rabbit with a 40 litre gas tank
From what I remember the biggest opponent to it was the sports people. :redface:
Good gawd, we would have to change all of our records. the football field would now be 110 feet (gee just like a soccer field). :tongue: How can you have a baseball only 130 meters rather than 400 feet. :confused:

Also back then there were only a few of them thar foreign cars :D , you they cheap just crap & they use that stupid metric system, well hell, here is Texas we aint gonna let them foreigner try to take over us... :headshake
WE got our great American cars & we are all getting 16 miles to the 55 cent gallon gasoline. ;)

Oh by the way we DID crash a satellite into Mars because Lockheed engineers used SAE instead of metric, ot so they said... :mad:

Now that the world has changed & American businesses had to adapt to live & we are alot more intune with the the products made elsewhere that use metric, we adapt just a little, JUST Dont mess with out Sports records because we would have to put an " * " next to our heroes scores... Oh wait we are doing that now//// :rolleyes:

Hey I totally understand your frustration & I have known & dealt with it for 30 plus years as an adult....;)

[exsailor]

When you order house studs do you order in Metric or British (2x4)? LOL :D

[SuperGLS]

Bill, I never thought about the sports... interesting. I'd like to be all metric, but I don't think the sports would have to change. Just normal day to day things.

Back to the flame, well done.

[only1db]

i applaud the well thought out flame!!!

vsolo...interesting stuff....

i too dislike sae....atleast when working on cars...i'm so used to using mm that when somebody ask for a 3/8's or something i have to think about it....

i know that 1/2 inch is the same as 13mm....hahahah

[Frick]

If you are an engineering student get an HP 48GX (IIRC, it was the 48G back in the day). It has built in conversions. Input the starting amount and just hit the unit of measure you want.

[KeWLKaT]

My 20$ calculator does conversions hahaha

Ah, the joys of multiplying Horsepower by 746 in order to get Watts ;)

[ricerrx7]

divide (lb*ft)/s by 550 to get horsepower? who comes up with this ****?


Where did this equation come from? If I'm not mistaken, I think there are two equations being mixed together in this one.
HP=tq*rpm/5252
1 HP= the ability to move 550 lbs 1 foot in 1 minute

[Munky]

i too dislike sae....atleast when working on cars...i'm so used to using mm that when somebody ask for a 3/8's or something i have to think about it....

Same here. I had to constantly ask Andy the conversions when I was working on my car.

[PSUsouthpaw]

yoiu foreigners can keep your communist free healthcare,

I wholeheartedly agree.

[theWorst]

sometimes i joke with my wife about her weight...

but then i say Kilograms she screams.

[only1db]

thats just ****ed up!!

[Doohickie]

Quit yer belly-achin'.

New engineers these days are such wimps.

Learn how to use a slide rule, then come talk to me.

[Silentwolf]

And yet another reason i got out of engineering.

[rusto85]

Engineer's get paid alot....for the most part. So it is expected for all of them to know such methods. Metric is way easier and precise.

Though I do agree on football...it would be weird hearing John Madden say "it's 3rd down and 30 centimeters"

[only1db]

^hahaha! yeah i dont know if i could convert on that....


and MPH....KPH always throws me off....

[tharptroy]

Where did this equation come from? If I'm not mistaken, I think there are two equations being mixed together in this one.
HP=tq*rpm/5252
1 HP= the ability to move 550 lbs 1 foot in 1 minute
nah, you're wrong. its 550lb 1 foot in one second.

good ole james watt...

"The term "horsepower" was coined by the engineer James Watt (1736 to 1819) in 1782 while working on improving the performance of steam engines. This occurred while using a mine pony to lift coal out of a coal mine. He conceived the idea of defining the power exerted by these animals to accomplish this work. He found that, on the average, a mine horse could pull (lift by means of a pulley) 22,000 foot-pounds per minute. Rather than call this "pony" power, he increased these test results by 50 percent, and called it horsepower i.e. 33,000 foot-pounds of work per minute.

Under this system, then, one horsepower is defined as:

1 hp = 33,000 ft.lbf/min (550 ft.lbf/s) (745.700 watts)


the (T*rpm)/5252 deal is just a way to get horsepower from measured torque and rotational rpm

and doohikie, while I agree that I'm lazy, you have to admit that the british units system is very poorly designed.

and f*ck slide rules, I sleep with my Ti-89. and while it can do unit conversion, I usually look up the conversions somewhere else.