This is totally one of those sitting on the toilet pondering life questions but it’s stuck in my head.
I recently had to work on a project which required me to buy and use SAE sockets. I really only work on fairly modern cars and motorcycles which are by and large metric so never really used SAE. I noticed when grabbing sockets from the box and bringing them over to the workpiece I struggled initially a little with assessing how much larger a socket was in proportion to another because the denominator was different so lost perception of scale, a quick way to solve this would to use decimals. Why don’t they do that? I’m sure there’s a reason and I know if you work in standard all the time it becomes second nature but always was curious why they never just did decimals vs different fractions it seems like it would be easier to delineate between sockets like metric.
I recently had to work on a project which required me to buy and use SAE sockets. I really only work on fairly modern cars and motorcycles which are by and large metric so never really used SAE. I noticed when grabbing sockets from the box and bringing them over to the workpiece I struggled initially a little with assessing how much larger a socket was in proportion to another because the denominator was different so lost perception of scale, a quick way to solve this would to use decimals. Why don’t they do that? I’m sure there’s a reason and I know if you work in standard all the time it becomes second nature but always was curious why they never just did decimals vs different fractions it seems like it would be easier to delineate between sockets like metric.
Last edited: