Pipe and tube

[mklotz]

I hear you C-bag. Don't get me started on idiotic nomenclature systems.

Labeling drills with fractions is bad enough but numbering them and then making the biggest numbers correspond to the smallest sizes. Plus, if you make a drill bigger than #1 now you're into the double idiocy of things like #0, followed by #00, #000, etcan. We already had that with machine screws, the infamous #0-80, #00-90, #000-120 and #0000-160, so what do they do? They use letters of the alphabet A-Z, thus creating a closed-at-both-ends nomenclature that won't easily permit the addition of larger/smaller sizes or intermediate sizes.

It may be logical in the wire-drawing factory to label wire with a number denoting how often it's been pulled through the dies, but why allow that system out into a world where most people care about the diameter of the wire and not the details of how it was made? Plus this leads to a counter-intuitive system where higher numbers mean smaller wire.

But let's not risk any consistency, they chortle. Let's label music wire with thicker wire having the larger number just to keep them on their toes. I wonder that they didn't label it with the note it would sound when plucked on an eighteenth century zither.

The standards agencies in most metricized nations have had the good sense to label things with the size; a 6 x 1 metric screw tells you right off everything you want to know. Note that nomenclature systems are not an element of the metric system (one of my pet peeves is that everyone seems to think so) but are the product of folks who gave some thought to how they would name things.

Sorry for the rant; this stuff sets my teeth on edge.