Used a couple of US recipes recently and most of the ingredients are in cups, or spoons, not by weight. This is a nightmare to convert. Do Americans not own scales or something? What’s the reason for measuring everything by volume?
What’s half of 27mm?
We can keep doing that dance, it’s possible to find similar inconveniences in the fractional inch system, like “what’s a third of a whole inch?” but I find that within each system’s conventions (like using 19 and 27mm stock versus 3/4" or 1 1/2" stock) you’re less likely to run into them working in fractional inches. I think because the wood shop is just a fractional kind of place, I divide by two and three out there a lot.
The machine shop isn’t so much, which is why we tend to work in either thousandths of an inch or increasingly in metric. Most CNC machines will gladly accept both.
As for calipers: In the wood shop, I frequently use a set of dial calipers calibrated in 64ths of an inch. Especially with my thickness planer on which one full turn of the handwheel moves the cutter head 1/16", so the major, medium and minor marks on the caliper dial work out to a full, half and quarter turn on the handwheel. The analog display makes the relationship between the calipers and the tool very intuitive in a way that improves accuracy and repeatability largely by decreasing error.
I don’t really need precision beyond 1/64", but I do need to be able to tell if it’s a thin 64th or a fat 64th or a dead nuts 64th.
