Hey! Just eleven days between posts! It must be the voice recorder idea, right? Nope.
I bought the voice recorder five or six years ago (maybe more, I’m not good with dates) to use for my work – to make a daily log of what was done so that I could efficiently do the billing. Of course, the time that I’d want to dictate would be during the drive home and was stymied by the noise cancelation in the voice recorder. I’d play it back and couldn’t distinguish a single word! Technology, great stuff!
Prior to this I used notebooks to write in, but I went from meticulously making every entry in the beginning, to a slow, steady decent into nothing, just scrambling to figure out what we had done, and where, when it came time to make up the invoices. I mentioned my lack of discipline before, didn’t I?

Ok, on to the topics. First up a note to all readers of this section that I have finally set up a Facebook page for the site. In it, I’ll be doing the same thing as I have been doing on the Google+ page, and that’s posting project updates and previews, as well as sharing anything that I think is interesting and relevant to the woodworking content on this website.
I actually signed on back in 2011, shortly after starting this website, but quickly got overwhelmed with all that I had going on at that time and didn’t bother doing anything else with it until now.

Next up is something that I see often in the comments on my videos. Whenever I show or say a measurement in inches, someone (usually from Europe) tells me I should learn metric. There are two distinct ways that this irks me: the first is that I already know metric, but he assumes I don’t. It’s obvious to him that If I knew it, I would be using it, since it is so much better. Besides, “learn metric” is somewhat of an oxymoron – it really can’t be learned, it’s just numbers and names. if you made it out of elementary school, you’ve probably already mastered the tricky part.
Second, the implication that if I did “learn” metric and start using it, the accuracy of my projects would improve. I say implication, but this specific “advantage’ has been pointed out to me several times. The imperial system, they say, is not based on reliable, fixed criteria like the metric system. It is messy, with crazy names for units, like “feet” and “yards”. Someone even mentioned cubits! Broken up into silly numbers, like 12, and the absurdity of fractions – everyone knows that fractions are not accurate! I gleaned much of this from nearly 100 comments in a single chain on one of my videos. I finally had it with the email notifications I get for replies to the “thread” (YouTube – the forum…), it felt like I was losing brain cells with each response I read, so I deleted the whole thing. It had started to degrade, as these things normally do, into insults and baiting comments, so no great loss.
What I’ve tried to explain before (I don’t bother anymore) is that I like working in inches and fractions of inches. I have a much better visualization for the measurements: I can picture what 16″ looks like, but would have to think about 406mm. I’d actually have to convert it to 16″ in my head to “see” it. I also like the mental excercise that working with fractions provides, and that’s something that a lot of people could do more of, not less.
The materials that we buy and use for various projects are all in imperial units here in North America. Dimensional lumber, sheet goods, and commonly available hardware. You will still have to understand imperial units to function, so the addition of metric only complicates the woodworking / building process.
In my commercial construction job I had to deal with both. Metric is supposed to be used exclusively in that sector, but I spent the vast majority of my time installing American made door hardware that has imperial measurements for mounting locations. At home and in my shop, I’ve always used imperial.
There’s another really good reason to stay with imperial: the vast majority of my audience, both on this website and on YouTube, are American. They didn’t fall for the metric mumbo-jumbo like the rest of us suckers did.
I do make the plans that I sell on this site available in both, as it is relatively simple for me to convert the dimensions. Still, it adds a fair amount of time to it.
Some of the free plans also have metric, but not many. It’s interesting when I get an email asking me for the metric version of a free plan.

Here in Canada, we use both systems pretty much equally. We have Celsius for temperature, kilometers for highway travel, and liters for pop and gasoline, but stick with Fahrenheit for cooking temperature, cups and teaspoons for liquid measurements, and for the most part feet and inches for linear measurement. The “conversion” here has created a complete mess.
It’s similar to saying that our alphabet is no longer suitable, and that we should switch to Cyrillic. Or maybe just use Cyrillic for some words. Or the words that we have been using to describe certain things are no longer suitable, and that from now on we will have to call them something else. Or having 24 hours in the day is very confusing, and that we should round that off to 10.
So, you be the judge – has metric made anything easier? Has it saved us money, or has it needlessly complicated nearly every aspect of daily life? I say it has, we would have been much better off staying with the one system that already existed. Let the rest of the world be metric, if that’s what they have been using.