| The thing is that what's left of American manufacturing tends to be producing the things that you just mentioned: steel, fasteners, rebar, etc. The labor advantage that China has is more than offset by the massive weight and volume construction materials have for a given price. Non-construction materials are already readily available in metric units. I can buy grade 8 bolts in any size, metric or US customary. I can't buy 400 x 800 plywood, and why the hell would I want to? Everything here is built on 24 or 18 inch centers. You'd have to be insane to build a house using metric dimensions. US customary units are nowhere as difficult to use as people make them out to be, especially at the scales being used for construction. I find metric and US customary equally easy to use, and I think that metric is much easier to use when it comes to electricity, but I find US customary much easier to use for everything else. For instance, the meter is widely held to be better than the traditional US customary units. I think this is true for science, but when it comes to everyday uses I find the US system easier to perform math with purely because it's base 2 rather than base 10, and most of the time I'm dividing things in half several times. Need to find the center of a 1-7/8" board? It's 15/16ths, which is really easy to calculate if you understand fractions. That's basically like figuring out the center of a 50mm board -- 25mm, obviously. However if you divide each board again, you get 15/32nds, or 12.5mm. If you divide again, into eighths, you get 15/64ths, or 6.25mm. Maybe 15/64ths seems a bit clunky, but my tools usually have markings down to 64ths, and I have bits available all the way down to 64ths. The example I picked was deliberately bad for US imperial, and it still was pretty easy to calculate. I think US customary units are really confusing to metric types because they don't really have a reason to use fractions in daily life. Math with fractions is really easy to do in your head though, and most tradesman are doing the math in their head. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a bigger push towards metric as education shifts away from pencil and paper. Metric makes way more sense than US customary does when you are doing math on a computer. |