I live in Canada, we use metric, I had to learn imperial when I started at a machine shop. The machines all worked to .0001 inches and we measured our pieces to 1/16" accuracy. Personally, despite using metric all my life and using it for almost everything else i've done. Using imperial and fractions of inches for that kind of work was more intuitive for me and a lot easier to figure out in my head. I find it a lot easier to mentally add fractions than decimals.
> Using imperial and fractions of inches for that kind of work was more intuitive for me and a lot easier to figure out in my head. I find it a lot easier to mentally add fractions than decimals.
Imperial fractions also tend to use base-2 numbers as the denominator. I'd be willing to bet that you infrequently saw anything that used thirds or fifths. Most everything would have been halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths or even thirtyseconds of something.
