I used to fly my microlight to Metheringham on Sunday mornings....It was a meet for local flyers....bit like the ton-up cafe boys but with wings. Small world, bet there aren't many who've even heard of Metheringham.
There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be
Today, the North Lincs branch Moto Guzzi club had their monthly meet at Bardney Heritage Centre – if you're on Farceberk, you could check out my photos (but only if you want to) Bardney Meet FB
"No matter how fast light travels it finds that the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it."
Yesterday – to celebrate the start of spring (kind of) – < 19 minutes
Trip to The Chestnuts Tearoom at Fleet Hargate, via back lanes to Gedney Drove End and past the River Nene. Also GoPro time lapse test number three. I was having issues with memory cards' write and read speeds.
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"No matter how fast light travels it finds that the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it."
a thought occurred, or more realistically, a question.
does anybody know why the English adopted metric for their engine capacities right back to the early days. The Americans steadfastly stuck to imperial through out, but the English used metric even though using imperial for everything else right up to the late sixties.
just askin.
There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be
Does Europe still measure tyre diameters (in the main) in inches ?
I notice the USA sometimes measures engine size in Metric, as an example the petrol Mustang is called the 5.0 (Litres) whereas in days of old it would be a 302 (cu in), and the latest Ford petrol V8 (Godzilla engine) is marketed as a 7.3 (Litres).
I watch a YouTuber called Cutting Edge Engineering in Australia (very entertaining if you like heavy engineering) and he refers to imperial inches as bananas. Someone even sent him a yellow plastic rule marked in bananas.
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
I claim no particular authority but here goes . . .
The motor car and motoring essentially were European inventions of the late nineteenth century - notably German and French - so it was natural that metric units would be employed in vehicle manufacture. Many of the early British vehicles were Continental products mostly made under licence but even Lanchester, Simms and the likes of Lawson dimensioned their engines metrically, so I suppose it just became the norm in the UK.
Generally, the Americans have been resistant to the adoption of any form of metrication for years but their automotive industry adopted metric units a long time ago; a necessary change to retain any export business. We shared the same degree of resistance here - I remember an MP saying in the Commons, We are going metric, inch by inch.
As for tyres, they have not always been measured imperially. Beaded edge covers (the first pneumatic type) and used up to the mid-'twenties were defined as, for example, 880 X 120. Inches came later but I don't know why they were adopted nor why they have been retained. It is only recently that the Europeans have forsaken BSP threads in their plumbing fittings.
ed wrote: ↑Sun Apr 03, 2022 8:42 am
a thought occurred, or more realistically, a question.
does anybody know why the English adopted metric for their engine capacities right back to the early days. The Americans steadfastly stuck to imperial through out, but the English used metric even though using imperial for everything else right up to the late sixties.
just askin.
I remember while I was still a kid my dad telling me car engines were specified in horsepower, e.g. for a while he had a second-hand (pre-war, most likely) "Standard Eight" (8 hp), altho I was very young at the time and hardly remember it. The authorities based the road tax on the bore diameter, because they had this formula for using that to work out the horsepower. This gave rise to numerous (as in, the most used) long-stroke designs, where you could up the capacity and thus the power but keeping the bore diameter at the cheaper end of the tax scale. Presumably the aurhorities got wise to this and so changed the rules. It then became based on cubic capacity, as a guide to power output, regardless of other dimensions, and maybe because of our proximity to the European mainland, metric was adopted.
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"No matter how fast light travels it finds that the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it."