I was going to pull out one of my metric tape measures and lay out something 103 cm. Hmm.

metric rules.pdf

Edited September 2Sep 2 by kmealy

if....if i was to work in metric (SI, please.....) it would mostly be in mm or meters. no cm, too easy to confuse things.

similar to construction, if it is under 10 feet, it's all in inches (it's never 7 foot, 9 inches, it's 93 inches.), so if was under say 3-5 meters (i'm about 2m tall), it would be in mm only.

but....i'm still stuck in inches and fractions there of. phew! and i can accurately measure down to 0.001"

I use Sketchup for designing stuff. Because of the software idiosyncrasies working in metrics is a little easier. But, I still can't make easily make conversions without a Google conversion site.

The third one down, I don't think they understood significant figures....

On 9/2/2026 at 6:39 PM, DAB said:

similar to construction, if it is under 10 feet, it's all in inches (it's never 7 foot, 9 inches, it's 93 inches.),

I did some work with an architect at a church a while ago. He specified the lecturn as 3' 9". Yikes.

I almost never work with anything over 8' so it's always inches for me. I had to note on the drawing 45"

Same here, the line is somewhere around 10 feet. I think the difference in call out nomenclature shows the difference between a person who mainly works with drawings and one who mainly works with a tape. I've noticed at the drawing stage I'm usually working in feet and inches, but when I get to the cut list stage I'm converting it all to plain inches.

30 minutes ago, JWD said:

Same here, the line is somewhere around 10 feet. I think the difference in call out nomenclature shows the difference between a person who mainly works with drawings and one who mainly works with a tape. I've noticed at the drawing stage I'm usually working in feet and inches, but when I get to the cut list stage I'm converting it all to plain inches.

as i was saying.....

made a little table recently, it was 39" tall. not 3'-3", not 1M (which would be 39.325 inches), but 39".....

edit...more exactly, after consulting with google, 1M =3 ft 3.37 in, so just a bit shy of 39-3/8", but good enough for rough work (got a hammer?). the answer in the last sentence was auto generated when i typed =, the google answer was 39.3701 inches, which works out to 39 - 23.69/64", or about 39-5.92/16". go ahead, show me how you'd measure that on a tape measure.....i'll just go with 39-3/8"

Edited September 4Sep 4 by DAB

10 hours ago, DAB said:

as i was saying.....

made a little table recently, it was 39" tall. not 3'-3", not 1M (which would be 39.325 inches), but 39".....

edit...more exactly, after consulting with google, 1M =3 ft 3.37 in, so just a bit shy of 39-3/8", but good enough for rough work (got a hammer?). the answer in the last sentence was auto generated when i typed =, the google answer was 39.3701 inches, which works out to 39 - 23.69/64", or about 39-5.92/16". go ahead, show me how you'd measure that on a tape measure.....i'll just go with 39-3/8"

The way I do that is to compare 0.375" and 0.3701" and realize it's less than 5 thousandths different. A thick piece of paper, like that construction paper we used to play with in gradeskool. Far less than a pencil line width, and that is the precision limiter for most woodworking!

exactly. i can make up 5/1000" with either a light sand, or just another half drop of glue.

normally, the finest i'll build to is 1/8", preferring major dimensions to be multiples of 1/2". makes it easier to keep track of things as i build (let's see....13/16 minus 5/8....time to redraw that part to get rid of the 16th.)

For a lot of things, exactness is overrated. IMO, consistency is often more important than exactness. If a table is consistently 30.2" high it's better than if the legs are 0.1" variation and it wobbles

1 hour ago, kmealy said:

For a lot of things, exactness is overrated. IMO, consistency is often more important than exactness. If a table is consistently 30.2" high it's better than if the legs are 0.1" variation and it wobbles

Exactly! 🤣

Seriously though, a true statement. Measure everything very consistently with a tape that is 1/4" short, and you'll probably never notice.