Oops, a can of worms that isn't labelled "chrome hardware"! I'm happy to live in a land where the two systems co-exist. I'm much more comfortable talking about small things (screws, nuts, bolts, small gaps, hex heads) in metric, but use imperial for larger stuff (road distances, height/weight of people, bags of sugar, weight of meats, scale length (863.6mm doesn't quite trip off the tongue like 34"
). I can't stand all this talk of eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds and sixty-fourths of an inch. I think nut width is my tipping point (where I'd rather say 38mm than 1 1/2")
Sometimes we get swindled in the conversion. When I was a kid we used to be able to buy a quarter pound of sweeties (candy?) which got shortened to "a quarter of" whatever (Kola Kubes if you're offering). Once the shops went metric, we got offered 100g bags - no doubt for the same price. A whole 13.3g less. Scandal! It can work out in your favour though. Because people like to make nice sounding numbers, I was in a restaurant recently which offered a 250g sirloin steak. That's an extra 3 sixty-fourths of a pound, folks. So it's not all bad
