Thousandth of an Inch
en.wikipedia.org
Thousandth of an Inch
1–10 of 69 posts
Re: Thousandth of an Inch
#2Aaaargh, why do people do such stupid things?? Because they started doing it a long time ago when it wasn't stupid.
Re: Thousandth of an Inch
#3I've been regularly watching various machinists on YouTube for a few years now, so this feels very normal to me even though I have no actual experience in machining.
Re: Thousandth of an Inch
#4i know a few machinists who can think in thous.
Re: Thousandth of an Inch
#5What I find amazing is that one thousandth of an inch is not particularly precise when it comes to machining. You can easily make parts to that accuracy with common mills and lathes.
Also surprisingly (to me) is if you have a pin that goes into a hole that is 1-2 thousandths of an inch larger than the pin, it feels like a sloppy loose fit. If you want the pin to feel like a really nice smooth fit you need more like a couple TEN THOUSANDTHS of an inch clearance.
Re: Thousandth of an Inch
#6Like the article says, we machine parts with tolerances in thousandths of an inch, but certain specifications like paint thickness are specified in “mils” which is also thousandths of an inch.
Re: Thousandth of an Inch
#7[deleted]
Re: Thousandth of an Inch
#8More fun with units, a "tenth" is a tenth of a mil.
Re: Thousandth of an Inch
#9i know a few machinists who can think in thous.
my dad's a machinist; I am from exposure. Every time I express anything technical to him there is a translation that has to take where we stumble around until we convert what i'm saying (metric) into thou.
i've been doing it for years and i'm still shite at it.
Re: Thousandth of an Inch
#10When doing PCB layout, you're basically forced to think in thousandths, but work in millimeters... You end up memorizing multiples of 2.54mm (0.100in)