Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

That is one thing you guys do, you say your sizes backwards. eg 2 by 4, whereas we always talk about hitting some1 over the head with a 4b2
Crazy ppl, and yes, despite us engineers, CAD jockies, scientists etc all using metric and singing it's praises, I still ask for a 3 metre length of 4b2, not 100 x 50
Not everybody is converted yet, and actually, the timber is milled in imperial, and cut to foot lengths, then measured in metric!
So we can get 1200, 1500, 1800, 2100 and 2400 as standard sizes for almost anything builder's hardware.
Pipes come in 13mm, 19mm, 25mm, 32mm, 50mm, 75mm and 100mm (0.5,0.75,1,1.5,2,3,4)"
it will be a very long time before things like that change.
Also, as the imperial bolts and screws are all but gone professionally, the machines were all flogged off, and bought by china for chicken feed. Thus our major stores are flooded with cheap imperial bolts, and it's damned hard and expensive to get metric ones when you need them...

Hmmm... What's this thread about again?

1/12th of a Cubit Uniseals!!

See that's where I was going wrong! I thought it was 1/132 rod diameter uniseals!
Somebody tried telling me it was a third of a sixteenth of a fathom, but I didn't believe them. 1/48 is just unfathomable really...

interesting... 4 cubits to a fathom... neat fit. Have to store that one away

We could just all adopt the original Roman measures:

INTERESTING HISTORY LESSON

Railroad tracks. This is fascinating.

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England , and English expatriates built the US railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England , because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe(and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with it?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horse's asses.) Now, the twist to the story:

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRB's. The SRB's are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRB's would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB's had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRB's had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly
wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything... and

CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling everything else.

Now that is what I call a classic...

That's an awesome story

Kuda,


I still think it's 3/5ths of 5/8ths of F*** All ! !

Happy Unisealing, but I prefer Thru Tank or Bulkhead fittings anyway! No spray, spit or slippery stuff to install them and they can be dissembled just as efficiently.
Cheers IanK

As do I, but uniseals have their place... the fit a standpipe much better, and allow for fine tuning.

Without having a massive shifting wrench ro a big pair of stilsons able to grip the 40mm or 60mm hex ends on bulkheads, I've had NO END of trouble attempting to remove them after they've had a chance to get biofilmed. that goes for any bulkhead 1" and up.

cool bit of trivia burnsy ....is good to see the seppo's got something right...unlike us, adopting the vhs vs beta vs laser disc vs (useless) blueray approach to our nations rail guage.............just one of many reasons to abolish state governments rofl