Originally Posted by
Andrew Seemann
I do US imperial with fractions; its what I have used for woodworking for the last 40 years and what almost all of my tooling is. I can "see" inches and halfs and quarters and eighths and sixteenths and thirty seconds; I can't do that in metric. Metric units always seemed clumsy, millimeters and centimeters seem too small for furniture sized projects and meters too big. Base 12 is much easier to halve, third, and quarter. Base 10 not so much.
Back in my machinist days, I did both decimal inches and metric. I preferred inches because thousands were easy to work with, but I would do metric when somebody gave me a plan in metric. Back then I could convert back and forth in my mind, not anymore unfortunately.