Honest Question: with metric truck why include SAE hardware?

It is quite simple to toss the National Coarse hardware and switch to Metric JIS hardware .

When buying in bulk 500 pieces plus National Coarse is much cheaper then Japanese Industrial Standard

 

Some of you out there will remember the brief effort in the 70s to switch the U.S. to the metric system.
Congress passed the U.S. Metric Conversion Bill and President Ford signed it.
The trouble was, it specified the conversion be VOLUNTARY.

Jeez, what was the point of that?
I'm as skeptical as the next guy about the Federal Government.
But standard weights and measures? Voluntary?
If it had been made mandatory, the uncomfortable period of adjustment would be a distant memory by now.

So now the road signs in kilometers are long gone.
And apart from Liberia, Myanmar and a few Pacific island flyspecks, we're alone in not requiring the metric system as our SOLE system of weights and measures.

So for about two generations, we've had a bastard dual system.
To trade with the rest of the world, we gotta use metric. But we keep the old system domestically.
The added costs to commerce are incalculable.
It's more than just the inconvenience to guys like you and me to have two sets of tools.
Or the waste of getting two sets of fasteners when we buy accessories of one kind or another.

Anyone remember the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999?
There was a mix-up in the thruster performance data. Pound-force-seconds versus Newton-seconds.
It burned up in the Martian atmosphere.
And that was NASA, for pity's sake.
There must be plenty more examples of costly errors in private industry.

Okay, rant off.
But man, that has always annoyed me.
Stupidity on a monumental scale.

 

I’ll go against the grain and say that I hate the metric system.

 

Metric 8.8 is equivalent to SAE grade 5. 10.9 equals grade 8. Metric 12.9 equals grade 9 or ASTM 2574.

 

This exactly - grade 8 SAE hardware is much easier to find and cheaper than a metric 12.9 bolt.

 

I gotta ask why, as well? From a respected aftermarket fabricator.

 

Stems from my days in college when all the engineering problems would try to trick you by mixing all the metric units to throw you off. There are just way too many divisions of units in the metric system. Yes, they are all multiples of 10 but it still gets confusing to which is the correct one for an equation. It’s just unnecessary to have that many subdivisions. Always, Celsius is not granular enough for weather based temperature measurement IMO. Fahrenheit is ~2x as granular.

Plus, 10mm sockets ALWAYS disappear. When was the last time you lost a 3/8” socket?

 

And Kelvin is even more granular than Fahrenheit!! Absolute zero FTW!

Fractions suck ass, but Americans can't quit them. I deal with surveyors and surveys alot. Damned idiots deal in tenths of feet. How many inches is a 10th of a foot?? Who the Fack knows!

 

I'm cool with fractions, but you have to use them correctly. Using nanometers and decameters at the same time?...nah, I'm good.

 

LOL. How do you use fractions incorrectly?

I memorized pico, nano, micro, mili and kilo a long time ago. After memorizing a few prefixes, "moving the dot" is a helluva lot easier than converting 10ths of an inch into yards.....

 

So you're telling me you'd rather use slugs, ounces and yards haha?

 

^^^^^^This is how. Plus why would you functionally need to convert inches to yards?

 

Never come across a problem where I had to use yards, except in football for some reason. Slugs don't bother me too much. A little slimy, but generally harmless.

 

Pretty sure my Gramma had kilo slugs in her garden in Oregon. 2.2 lbs of Geranium gobbling terror but still not sure if I got the math right.