[AT] tractor hauling truck now metric coordinates.

Mon Feb 24 13:50:08 PST 2020

I have worked in the dam engineering field for over 40 years. With the 
beginning of an international society for dams and engineering, the 
measurements became metric.  I still have to convert to have a good 
grasp of the aspects of a particular dam.    I try to use yards instead 
of meters when quickly trying to estimate something.

I worked with a military unit in the 90's surveying elevations for some 
remote sensing sites in SW Oklahoma .   We used an inertia-gyroscope 
type survey instrument that was in metric, it was supposed to work in 
the UTM ( Universal Transverse Mercator ) system.  They started using 
these in the Korean War.  A week into our project it started having 
problems, it was 2 days before we caught on that it was giving us bad 
elevation data.  At the time none of us were very well versed in metric, 
and we were not checking the output to see if it was even in the 
ballpark.  We also did not know which sea level datum was being used in 
its system.  The system was over a million bucks and this was about the 
beginning of the GPS systems.  Most of the early GPS systems would not 
give good elevation data unless you had 2 receivers, so this system was 
faster and the military assured us it was reliable.....it had to go to a 
service depot in Houston along with the Hummer it was mounted in.  We 
borrowed another unit from a national guard unit in central OK to finish 
by our deadline. Later when we had a GPS we rechecked our elevations and 
found them to be off a lot.  There was no correlation on how much we 
were off either.   I later talked to an old military surveyor who told 
me that we needed to travel from East to West when working with these 
units to reduce the error.    The funniest thing about these systems was 
that they were used for setting the coordinates for heavy artillery 
fire!!!!!!  When I told my boss about the inaccuracies and  what the 
system was used for, we all had a good laugh....
Cecil

On 2/24/2020 10:57 AM, Mike M wrote:
> My wife is in is in health care and all they use is Metric.
>
> Mike M
>
> On 2/24/2020 9:55 AM, Phil Auten wrote:
>>
>> The metrification began before the 80's, Stephen. I owned a '72 Pinto 
>> Wagon that was mixed SAE and metric. I suspect that every foreign car 
>> imported into the US was either all metric or a mix, since most of 
>> the rest of the world has been on the metric system for several decades.
>>
>> Phil in TX
>>
>>
>> On 2/23/2020 5:15 PM, Stephen Offiler wrote:
>>> Sprayed liners are far from new.  BMW built motorcycle engines with 
>>> this technology back in the 1980's and riders have been know to put 
>>> 300,000 and more miles on those bikes.  There was a time BMW car 
>>> engines used a similar technology and developed a bad reputation.  
>>> It was actually due to high sulfur fuel, and for one thing our fuel 
>>> in the USA now has far lower sulfur than back then, and for another 
>>> thing the whole industry moved to a different alloy that is not 
>>> susceptible.
>>>
>>> Does anyone care what percentage of the fasteners are metric?  I've 
>>> been wrenching domestic vehicles that have a mix of SAE and metric 
>>> ever since we tried the metric system in the USA back in the 80's.  
>>> It's hardly an issue worth mention.
>>>
>>> And several car companies in recent years have paid large fines for 
>>> overstating fuel economy.  I'll go out on a limb here and guess that 
>>> Ford has incentive to be very truthful with those numbers.
>>>
>>>
>>> SO
>>>
>>> On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 10:35 AM James Peck <jamesgpeck at hotmail.com 
>>> <mailto:jamesgpeck at hotmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     Some updates on the 2019 F150 no options pickup I looked at.
>>>     
>>>     Base engine is a 3.3L aluminum block V6 with sprayed in cylinder
>>>     liners. The Cleveland engine plant has an attached aluminum
>>>     foundry.
>>>     
>>>     Someone somewhere knows what percentage of the fasteners on the
>>>     vehicle are metric. 
>>>     
>>>     I suspect the combined highway mileage is a tad optimistic.
>>>     
>>>     https://www.wardsauto.com/penton_modal/nojs/forward/50363/0
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