I know Al,

But it was LOTS of fun.

Jack

Ah, yes; but I think it may have been at I my expense; although I was confused about who was disagreeing with who, or who was mixing weights and volumes. But it was my fault for bringing up this technicality, and I guess somewhere in there I got caught cross-wise with it.

But now that my anniversary celebrations are over, and my headache is almost gone; allow me to digress. The culprit is this *fluid* oz; which, dang-it, is a slang unit. Just like “dang-it” is not in the dictionary; the fluid oz is not in the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, or in the official listings of the International General Conference on Weights and Measures. Ounces and pounds are units of weight, and teaspoons and pints and quarts are units of volume.

You see, somewhere is the distant past; some of our ancestors were measuring other fluids with a measure calibrated in ounces of water at 59F, and calling it a certain number of ounces of that fluid. When their error was pointed out; they were like – “er, ah; OK, we’ll call it a ‘fluid’ ounce then”, and it has been commonly used as a measure of ‘volume’ ever since for recipes in the kitchen - and in measuring 2-cycle oil.

But as long as we agree that a quart is always 0.94645 liters, and that a pint is not always a pound, we can get along quite well.

Now if we could get rid of this strange and ambiguous ‘British’ system of units this confusion would all go away. Did you know that in 1960, at the Eleventh General Conference on Weights and Measures, 36 countries, including the United States, officially sanctioned and agreed to adopt the ‘International System of units’ (known as Systeme International d’Inites, designated SI in all languages) based on the metric system? Even the National Bureau of Standards officially adopted it. Unfortunately, in this country the effort to convert failed due to the immense mental inertia; and, of course the billions of dollars invested in tooling.

So now we are stuck with building our airplanes in inches and feet, while we build our engines millimeters and centimeters; and measuring 2-cycle oil in FLUID oz.

Al (maybe I’ll go back and lie down now)