Blue View – Are American Carpenters Smarter?

I’m interrupting the narrative of our bike trek to talk about the manly subject of carpentry. Prior to our departure, I was  busy building a ‘camping box’ for our Kia Sorento. The goal of the new box was to organize our camping gear better than our prior system which consisted of assorted storage bins, duffels and grocery bags. One pull-out section is devoted to all our galley/cooking stuff like the stove, pots, pans, utensils, plates, etc. Another pull-out drawer holds our cooler – which may be upgraded to a fridge someday in the future. The remaining space in the center is used to store water jugs and a few other miscellaneous items like our trekking poles. The job would have been easier if I was a better carpenter, but, despite my ineptitude, it turned out reasonably well.

I still use feet, inches and fractions to measure and cut the wood pieces. Even though most of the rest of the world has long since adopted the metric system, us old guys in the U.S. have pretty much stuck to the traditional method. It’s not that I’ve not tried the metric system - I used it extensively in other countries when we were meandering around the world on Nine of Cups. I actually liked using it and found it much easier than our antiquated system. Likewise, back in my engineering days, parts drawings and measurements were usually done using inches with  hundredths and thousandths of an inch instead of fractions... e.g. 3.375” instead of 3-3/8”. Nonetheless, when it comes to carpentry projects, I always seem to revert back to fractions.

One likely reason for this is a Catch-22: because carpenters use inches and fractions, the measuring tools designed for carpenters are scaled in inches and fractions, and because the tools are scaled that way, carpenters continue to use the old system. Tape measures often come with both metric and fractional inch scales, but I can’t go into Lowes or Home Depot and find a metric square or speed square; carpenter drill bits, forsner bits, and router bits all come in fractional inches; ditto my table saw tape.

But I suspect there’s another explanation entirely. I think the reason American carpenters use inches and fractions is to show the world just how much smarter they are. Any dolt can use the metric system, but it takes real mathematical agility to do carpentry ciphering using inches and fractions. Say, for example, that you want to drill a hole in the center of a 130 cm piece of wood. Even the most simpleminded carpenter can divide 130 by two and come up with 65 cm - then measure 65 cm from either edge to find the center. The inch equivalent for that 130 cm piece of wood is 51-3/16”. To find the center of the piece of wood, an American carpenter would divide that in half; first divide the fraction in half (3/16” divided by 2 = 3/32”), then divide the whole number in half, (51” divided by 2 = 25-1/2”), then convert the 1/2” to a common denominator... well you get the idea. The end result is that the center is 25-19/32” from either edge. See how much smarter U.S. carpenters have to be to master their trade? In fact, to lay the groundwork for this expertise, a large part of the math curriculum of our first five years of school is devoted to the mastery of fractions. Of course, one could argue that the European carpenter probably had the hole drilled by the time I licked my pencil point and completed all those calculations on the back of the piece of wood. One could also argue that perhaps those five years studying fractions could be better spent learning something else if we were to adapt the metric system like most other nations of the world.

So, will American carpenters ever change to the metric system? I kinda doubt it... at least not in my lifetime. That’s not something that should or could be legislated, and no carpenter I know has any interest in changing. Besides, that seems like a slippery slope; next thing you know, our very smart cooks and chefs will start giving up their advanced measuring system of cups, teaspoons, and tablespoons and start using that dumbed down, simpler metric system of mg and ml.

See you Monday when we resume our trek on the Cowboy Trail…