Why are some road bikes sized in inches ?
My brother, Alan, in the UK is looking at buying his first road bike and is looking at THIS one.
Can anyone tell me though, why some bikes are sized using imperial inches rather than cm ?
Alan is looking for an entry level bike and wanted to spend a max of 600 UK pounds, so if anyone knows of a good bargain ( near the London area) we would be interested to know. ( Preferably 9 or 10 speed Tiagra, with a compact crank in a size 56cm)
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Pete Roberts on -
I don't think so. Most bikes I have looked at in Europe seems to be in cm. Just the odd one here or there uses imperial ...
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Permalink Reply by MARK FERGUSON (SPARTACUS) on -
UK and USA still use imperial measurements.
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Permalink Reply by Frank on
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Bit like how mtb's are in inches quite often!
Strange I think but many things are still imperial partly, like 18 inch wheels for cars but fit 235mm tires.
Strange world!
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Permalink Reply by Don (Who's lost?) Nairn on -
Perhaps you should go on an American forum and ask "why some bikes are in cm"
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Permalink Reply by David Southern on -
Or one could reply for Australia: Why are any bikes sized in cm, since centimetres are not part of the Australian standard for the implementation of the metric system? (No intermediate units between millimetres and metres.)
Conversion of units is not all that difficult, really. What is important is exactly what measurement is being described by whatever number and unit is given.
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Permalink Reply by Martin Turner on -
Conversion of units can become a nightmare. Right now I'm at work on an oil rig where we use every unit of measurement ever invented....drilling equipment is imperial, fluid volumes are in barrels, flow rates are in cubic feet per day or gallons per minute. That's all fine until I do my daily reports where everything has to be in metric units.
If that's not bad enough you then get other crazy situations such as a rough neck strapping drill pipe on a windy day with a tape measure that has a foot missing off the end. Even the tape measures can trip you up..some have 12" to the foot while others only have 10...theyre called "metric imperial tapes".
Making mistakes with unit coversions can sometimes cost you a heap of money as NASA discovered with their disasterous 1998 Mars Climate Orbiter mission:
"...on September 23, 1999, communication with the spacecraft was lost as the spacecraft went into orbital insertion, due to ground based computer software which produced output in English units of pound-seconds (lbf-s) instead of the specified metric units of Newtonseconds (N-s). The spacecraft encountered Mars at an improperly low altitude, causing it to incorrectly enter the upper atmosphere and disintegrate."
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Permalink Reply by Don (Who's lost?) Nairn on
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I would have thought if you were doing it regularly some sort of spread sheet would sort it.
Non standard units are a pest and make the straightforward complicated.
It could be worse if you are converting currency's the conversion factors are not constant.
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Permalink Reply by Martin Turner on
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Why waste time doing up spreadsheets when it's one country's stubborn refusal to drag itself into the 21st century that is the root of the problem.
People spend huge amounts of time and effort creating well thought out standards...and people refuse to use them..purely because their egos wont let them.
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Metric is so simple, even holding the dumb end of a tape measure makes sense.
All numbers round off evenly.
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Permalink Reply by Martin Turner on
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Too simple for some nations
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