What a drawing is dimensioned in is less the problem with me as I can work in both and I can convert if necessary. (I've a calculator, I also have one of those big Tracy Tools posters hanging in the workshop, using an old dress-hangar hooked over part of the overhead hoist – I knew I'd built that for a reason.)
More to the point is how it is dimensioned, and I do wish some of our drawings publishers would realise that machine tools are calibrated in either thousandths of inches or little bits of millimetres, not binary-fractions; and would think about how the part is made when deciding the datum face or corner.
I do agree the comments about the centimetre. I find them confusing. Tell me something is, oooh let's say, 10cm long and as a retired machine-shop worker and physics-lab assistant I have to convert it mentally to the proper 100mm. Then I'm happy. I can picture 100mm. It is four inches as near as dammit where real thous and proper bits of mm don't matter.
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Placing the 1st / 3rd -angle note and symbol on a drawing, as Old Mart says, is normal trade practice.
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I was intrigued to see in a local newspaper only the other day that the council is reviewing allotment rents, in …. the Rod!
Not sure how because the Rod is a lineal not areal unit, = 5.5 yards, about 5 metres. Perhaps it was a mis-quote of Square Rod.
As far as I recall, I was never taught the Rod, Pole or Perch even in Primary School way back in the early-1960s, where and when we had to learn such skills as Compound Multiplication to price commodities costing so-many £sd per Tons.cwt.qrs.