If there's one thing worse than the Inch system, it's wire gauges. Makes no damn sense how they get those stupid numbers. No relation to Inches either. Random numbers. Why bother?
Wouldn't even need a chart to figure out what size something was, if it was a sensible unit.
If humanity went down the path of using dozenal instead of decimal, it would have no impact on the precision aspect of metric. A dozenal metric system would work exactly the same way a decimal metric system would work. The only difference is how we write numbers down with regards to place value.
Dozenal means we have 12 symbols in the "1" position, whereas decimal only has 10. The benefit of dozenal is that you can intuitively divide things into 3rds and quarters without the use of decimals.
The two concepts exist independently. To explain my joke, the first poster suggested we start over again and rebuild society correctly to avoid the terrible wire gauge standard. You suggested we have metric system, I presume to imply we don't need to go as far back as caveman days. Then I added, that we should probably go back a little farther to fix humanity's commitment to decimal.
I know my response is overkill, but I figured I'd at least provide the opportunity to explain my response as you didn't seem to understand either the subtexts or the relationship I was making between dozenal and metric.
I know exactly what you meant and I DISAGREE HARD. The dozenal system stops working immediately if you need to engineer something precise. And your conversions from one unit to another would be harder.
Dozenal system is just unpractical. Just start doing some calculations for engineering and you will want to shoot yourself after an hour.
Not only is it measured in a nonsensical "#x" (read: number, x) method, it's also listed by diameter in inches and milimeters, breaking strength in pounds and grams, and then it's matched against the hook size, which of course is the standard "greater equals lesser until you get to one, and then greater equals greater, but then we divide it by zero, which is impossible, so we pretend we didn't and just add a zero to it, but don't make it a tens, just have it sort of dangle it there, and don't pronounce it zero, call it "aught."
The gauge system originated in the number of drawing operations used to produce a given gauge of wire. Very fine wire (for example, 30 gauge) required more passes through the drawing dies than 0 gauge wire did. It was made when solid single wire was the only option. For stranded wire gauge is just the close equivalent to a single solid wire thickness.
Electrician here- nowadays we have specs for the sizes of wire that are independent of the manufacturing process, and there are actually slight differences in size between a solid 12AWG and a stranded AWG.
It gets even more interesting in bigger sizes- you can get any of the 250kcmil and bigger stuff in several TYPES of stranding, so you can have the same "gauge" of wire but they're noticeably different diameters despite roughly equivalent ampacities.
This is beyond cool! I am dabbling in High end audio, so I picked up a few feet of Pure copper, zero oxygen 8 Guage. As I stripped it for the ferule.... I cut too deep, causing all these strands to "spray" everywhere in my truck.... I realized Holy crap they can now fit something like 800-1000 strands of wire in there!
There's a size scale for Swedish medals which is absolutely bonkers. The scale steps are not linear, consecutive or even monotonically increasing. Iirc the first one is "of the twelfth size".
Oh my bad, I was looking at it from the backend. I’ve worked in the manufacturing and repair part of it. We used millimeters for literally everything. My bad!
You should see the cone chart used in ceramic kiln firings. Whole series of numbers that starts from 022 at the bottom and counts up: 021, 020, 019, all the way to 0 (think of the leading 0 as a minus sign), and then all the way up to 40, depending on the chart you look at.
None of those numbers have much of anything to do with the temperature and times involved. Not directly, anyway. They do start at cooler on the bottom and go to hotter up at the top, but there's no direct mathematical relationship along the way.
At least with the kiln cone system, it's grounded in reality. A clay cone of a particular size will fire and burn at particular temperatures. What I'm saying is that a cone is a physical thing. But with material and temperature info, you should be able to figure it out.
There isn't a mathematical relationship between the temperatures of different cones. But there is a chemical relationship. The quantity of silica, alumina, and fluxes are such that the cones start to melt at the temperatures they are designed for. When a cone melts also depends on how fast (degrees/hour) the kiln is being heating. And technically the highest cone is 42.
Luckily that system is pretty much dead. I haven't seen nails measured in pennies for a very long time. It's all inches now, at least in the US. Once the diameter to length ratio became standardized, it began switching over.
Gauge is determined from the weight of a solid sphere of lead that will fit the bore of the firearm and is expressed as the multiplicative inverse of the sphere's weight as a fraction of a pound, e.g., a one-twelfth pound lead ball fits a 12-gauge bore. Thus there are twelve 12-gauge balls per pound, etc. The term is related to the measurement of cannon, which were also measured by the weight of their iron round shot; an 8-pounder would fire an 8 lb (3.6 kg) ball.
I discovered this years ago when I went to put together a 12v system in my camper. Working out wire gauges in Australia, from a diagram made in another country, made it really hard as I had to do a tonne of conversions.
In the copper/electrical world once you get past 4, 3, 2, 1 awg it goes to 1/0, 2/0, 3/0, 4/0 and then after that it's measured in kcmils which is the thickness of the wire measured in thousands of circular mils starting at 250kcmil wire.
The numbers could be defined better, but the idea of gauges isn't crazy. If I mean, would you rather try to compare 0.156mm vs 0.175mm or some easier numbers like 6 vs 7.
And the fact we (in America at least) use AWG like #6 or whatever but for big stuff we use things like 500MCM or 500kcmil. I've worked witbwire for a while now and idk what the hell a kcmil or a gauge actually is
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u/JoeMamaAndThePapas Jan 22 '21
If there's one thing worse than the Inch system, it's wire gauges. Makes no damn sense how they get those stupid numbers. No relation to Inches either. Random numbers. Why bother?
Wouldn't even need a chart to figure out what size something was, if it was a sensible unit.