Quote Originally Posted by Bruce View Post
Now I'm a high stakes retentive and for the life of me can't really figure out why all the worry about how the width of the blade is measured or why we stop at 16ths (on a good day and with a good ruler, I can get really close to a 64th and with my good glasses may even be able to get closer than that).
Because unlike the SI measurement system, the empirical system get unusable unless you simply memorize all units up to 1/128s.

If I talk about 23/64 or 51/128, I cannot imagine how much that really is.

With mm it would be easy enough, because increased precision does not change the units of measurement.
If I say 12 mm or 12,05 mm, I get a good idea about the size, regardless of how many digits you add after the decimal place.

But switching from 16ths to 32s to 64s to 128s is not easy unless you are trained for it.