As a machinist, in my area we never use the term mil in reference to sizes we are machining, but rather always in the thickness of something like rubber/nitrile gloves. We would say thousandths for imperial or for metric things we use the full name millimeters.
4 months ago
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Here in Aus, especially when I was an apprentice, "thou" was 0.001 Inch while "mil" (mil') was one millimeter. What a lovely mess two systems are!
4 months ago
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As an American hobbyist, most of my tooling is in inches. To avoid confusion, I never use “mil” for 0.001” even though it’s technically correct. .001” is a “thou”, .0001” is a “tenth”, and 1mm is a “millimeter” preferably, or a “mil” colloquially.
4 months ago
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Learn It!
Terminologies… 🧐
Terminology is a fun and interesting topic to me. As I’m creating these tutorials and using terminology that I grew up with and are used in the manufacturing industry in Canada, I have been asked by some commenters why I use the terms “thou” and “mil” and what they mean.
Let’s focus on the term “mil.” I did a little research and found out the following (based off of Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Wikipedia):
A mil is a unit of measurement that is equal to one-thousandth of an inch, or 0.0254 millimeters. It is used to measure the thickness of materials or the diameter of wires. For example, you might describe a plastic cover as being 10 mils thick.
The word "mil" is a shortened form of the Latin word mille, which means "thousand". It is pronounced as /mil/, rhyming with "bill" and "still".
In North America, "mil" is a formal unit name, but "mil" or "mill" is also a common colloquial term for millimeter. A millimeter is approximately 39 mils.
So it seems that I use the colloquial term for millimeter when I say “mil.” However, doing a little more research I see that the terms I use are more often used in the UK and Canada and somewhat adopted in the US. Therefore I wanted to poll my subscribers and ask for their feedback: when you hear the word “mil” what unit of measurement do you think of? Try and keep all comments positive using this as an opportunity to learn something new about terminologies used around the world. If possible, write where you’re from.
4 months ago | [YT] | 4