I’m a beginner in manufacturing (noob) and wanted to know the pro/con for choosing inch vs mm in my project types. If I had to lean towards a single choice in terms of primary skill set should I choose one over the other. I’m in the United States so obviously “Inches” seems more natural to me.
Regarding precision, working with other industry parts (mating/joining), and potentially other vendors what is the preferred choice?
No reason to lean one way, learn both. If the print is in inches, do inches. If the print is metric, do metric…Using CAD/CAM does not make any difference.
Within the US working in inches is typically the best answer on the manufacturing floor. Even when prints are all in metric, unless your machine is setup to read in metric and your inspection equipment is all metric based it will need to get converted to inch dimensions at some point in the process anyway.
From an engineering standpoint we dual dimension everything on prints here. This allows things to be designed in metric nominal numbers, metric components to be easily integrated with nominal numbers, and the dual units allow the manufacturing floor to easily use inch based inspection equipment without doing math on every dimension.
This was same method I used when I was responsible for a product line at our company, Our product, our drawings, our dimensions. The parts we made were sold Domestic and International, so it was improved communication with our Doctors overseas when they would ask size of the parts, our sales group could easily answer in metric. It does have some conflict dealing with tolerances at the shop floor. the traditional +/-. to .x or .xx or .xxx or .xxxx are not equivalent between inches and metric. Since we manufactured in USA, our shop floor machined and toleranced in inches.
Thanks everyone for your helpful insight! 