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Originally Posted by sapper740
26 degrees in Ol' Blighty?!? Are you sure that's not Fahrenheit? 
You'll be catching up to Texas' 32.2222222C. (that's what the temperature converter tells me) soon. . |
We've not been in ºF for decades now Derek and I have to say it is easier when water goes solid at 0 and gasseous at 100.
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As for the price of petrol, we're now paying $3.55 for the diminutive US gallon (I thought I saw Dick bin Turpin behind the cash register the other day.) with warnings of $4.00/gal prices to come this summer. The display at the pump should be changed from "Please pay" to "Stand and deliver!"
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Pffft, you're lucky. Four bucks a short US gallon, bargain; we're paying £4.95 which is $9.67 to you, although to be fair I should downsize that by 20% for the mean measures you call a gallon, so we'll call it $8.06; that'll be about twice then.
The bloke behind our gas pump cash registers is called Gordon Unelected-Brown by the way who trousers some 86% of the price.
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Believe it or not, we were sitting around the break table the other day and the subject of Metrification came up, after the obligatory talk of women, football, hockey (my choice), and oil prices were dispensed with, of course. To my surprise, the consensus was that it is high time for America to convert. To my knowledge, the U.S. is the last Imperial hold-out, other than the Sport of Kings. Somewhat ironic, no?
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Well now here's a thing; some 30 or more years ago when I spent a few weeks at Hughes Aircraft at Canoga Park LA, we were working on the appraisal to manufacture AMRAAM over here, HA were still in prototype development and it was already built to metric standards. A few years later I started on the UK microwave seeker for Hellfire to replace the IR designated version being made at Rockwell in Atlanta, now in service here and called Brimstone (cute huh?), we had no issues with mechanical interfaces as that was also metric.
I've a sneaky feeling all your mil and civil aircraft are metric and everything from an Abrams downwards is metric too. I don't think Boing (intentional) will make a Dreamliner to imperial standards and the A320's you have with the A380's coming along will definitely be metric.
I can tell you too all the John Deere, Case International and other US built farm tractors here are entirely metric too and have been for tens of years; I can't see them making two versions to different standards. We also have several US car makes here too of the smaller sizes and they're metric, so I think it goes farther than you might think already.
Anyway, look how easy it will become for Norm Abraham, instead of 1' 7" and 9/16" "heavy", he can just have 497mm.
Easy peasy.
R.