Machine shops and metric drawings

[LONDONDERRY]

So I had this meeting today with SMC, a machine shop and material manager and have any of you guys ever experience a fabrication house that says "...well the reason the we're late on deliveries is because the drawings are all in metric and we're not use to that standard, if they were english, things would go smoother" Now I'm being asked by SCM (supply chain) to change all the drawings to english, my response "I'll look into it"; but what I really want to do is give SCM and the shop the middle finger and then say a number is a number regardless if its imperial or metric, or we'll find a new shop

 

[3DDave]

In the mood for a joke? I'm in SCM and we know you've been posting and we're in a meeting to talk about it. Bwwaahaahaahaa.

Just kidding.

It sounds like SCM is putting the fun in dysfunctional. If they were to involve engineering and planning (have you got planners?) in the selection of suppliers, the costs to the company would probably go down as well as anti-acid consumption and so would schedule volatility with your own customers. Otherwise it's like a dramatic movie with a frightened couple trying to distract guests from kidnappers that promise to kill everyone if the police find out they are hiding there.

 

[LONDONDERRY]

Hahahaha...
The people in SCM are nice enough, but as an engineer if you ever want to see how bad it is come here. I've never seen where a groupo of people can take a simple design and act like we designed the Space Shuttle. I get into more debates with how they want BOM's structed, ECO workflow process, how they burn vendors, ordering, etc.

Or put it this way. in September of 2013 I released a simple packaging design, most off-the-shelf componetts. As of today we still don't the product and the PM has to go back to the customer (state BTW) to beg forgivness. Nowhere!! were I ever worked would this ever happen, people would be fired. In regards to a planner, oh yes we hired one of those does nothing but add to the problem by acting as a middle man between engineering and the vendors.. Did I mentioned that the company I has over 1600 people,

 

[looslib]

We tried an experiment one time with metric vs imperial dimensioned drawings sent to outside vendors for quotes. The part was the same one, just dimensioned differently. The metric dimensioned part was quoted higher to make than the imperial dimensioned part.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli

 

[dgallup]

We do everything in metric and have for more than the 30 years I've worked here. I've never had a vendor say it would take longer to get a metric dimensioned part but I've had plenty of shops take perfectly good metric drawings and redimension everything in imperial dimensions. They they do a layout of the part and report the imperial measurements. It infuriates me because I have to take the additional step of converting all their data back to metric. We recently worked with a custom machine builder who asked us "Is it OK to work in metric?". I almost kissed them.

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[truckandbus]

You need to dust off or create a set of engineering standards defining how inormation will be presented from the engineering department. This also applies to the earlier post you had on engineering BoMs and supply chain BoMs. Even if you have legacy drawings in imperial units, you can draw a line in the sand "as of August 1, 2014 all new parts and installations will be documented in metric"

 

[ajack1]

I don’t see how having metric drawings would cause a project to be late, especially if that is what they quoted against. It could be different if you quoted on imperial and got metric.

Buying is stock can be a problem or the extra machining required, if something is designed in metric then all unimportant features would probably be stock metric sizes the same applies to shafts, holes, etc, it probably doesn’t matter in many cases if something is 12mm or ½” but if you have to machine from stock rather than being able to buy off the shelf I can see that is a problem.

I guess this is only a problem in the USA as the rest of the world is metric, or at least to the best of my knowledge. I assume even for American companies that sell world wide everything is in metric? There does seem a fairly obvious solution to the problem.

 

[dgallup]

Oh, there are other countries: the industrial giants Burma (Myanmar) and Liberia still use imperial units. I think you can still buy a pint in an English pub too but that is a special exception.

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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.

 

[LONDONDERRY]

Short Story,
I was once employed at a very small biotech startuyp and we designed a small desktop instrument that was sent to EU for customer evaluation, with a sales team. It was during that time, there was a mechanical issue that required removing english SHCS. Because we didn't expect any issues, no tools were brought and we didn't have field tech position. Being the instrument was in the EU we couldn't quickly buy english hex keys or SHCS. It was a mess and after that I assured all designs would be in metric from that point on.

 

[KENAT]

LONDONDERRY, while we aren't as consistent with it as I'd like generally policy here on new products is to as a minimum use metric fasteners for all of the ones the customer is likely to touch. Second line is that it's good to have all fasteners our field service are likely to touch be metric. Finally, if we're really on a role we'll try to make all the fasteners in a product metric.

Never quite works because some catalog parts or legacy reused parts end up having inch fasteners or for some of the more specialized small screws there isn't a readily available metric option.

However, requiring metric fasteners does not in any way require use of metric dimensions on the drawing for other linear features. So our drawings are generally 'inch' but often have metric threads.

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