Discuss Rewiring in an "empty" and a plea for your spare Wagos in the UK Electrical Forum area at ElectriciansForums.net

Indeed the old adage, "better to be looking at it than for it" springs to mind!
….I had that mercilessly drummed into me by my old chief and I’ve probably thanked him every day since!
 
Seen so many cables too short, the old gaffer used to go mad with cables too long.
No one touches on that subject now, always leave longer
 
Seen so many cables too short, the old gaffer used to go mad with cables too long.
No one touches on that subject now, always leave longer
It IS a fine balance, I'll agree. But a new-build where there's half a drum's worth of 'slack' hanging out of every single back box is a sure fire to make my red mist descend, too. Apart from the principle of the wastage it's also throwing away your profit. I did it with a lad I had on site years ago, went around after the first fix he'd done and snipped back to 'sensible' lengths, gathered up all the waste and made a pile, made him measure it all and do the maths, told him that would have been the Friday beers I'd have bought him.
 
Cables are fine guv, you didn't didn't tell us it was in metric/imperial
I can't now remember exactly what it was but even fairly recently there was some massive space related cockup and upon investigation it turned out that half the American engineers has calculated using imperial, the other half metric and no-one had realised
 
The Hubble mirror was out be a tiny amount, so it had a monocle fitted.

The big screw up with imperial/metric was the reason the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost:

But you can also see what are possibly the most expensive set of 24 bolts in history:
 
So what units do these Yanks actually work in? I know it's inches, but is it inches, 1/10, 1/100, 1/1000 etc., which is effectively the metric system, but with a different reference length, or do they actually use yards, feet, inches, 1/4, 1/8, etc.
If it's the latter, it's no wonder mistakes occur.
 
Someone is going to be looking for a new job... What I find funny is the notion of two blokes pulling in the cables and find the first one is two short.. One guy turns to the other and says "I think this is too short", other bloke says "Meh, not my job" and they carry on installing the other 899 cables regardless...

Nobody wants too much left over but always best to be too long than too short..
 
So what units do these Yanks actually work in? I know it's inches, but is it inches, 1/10, 1/100, 1/1000 etc., which is effectively the metric system, but with a different reference length, or do they actually use yards, feet, inches, 1/4, 1/8, etc.
If it's the latter, it's no wonder mistakes occur.

Any Americans I've known have quoted measurements in the latter form.
 
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