Brad_Applied
Aluminum
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2016
Seems like a simple enough question, yet the visualization of what 1 ten thousandth of an inch might look like is difficult to grasp. We recently had some discussions here and we talk about it all the time…we make it sound like it’s close to a mile long. What I mean is out by .0001" is OUUUUUUUUUT. So we set on a journey to discover what .0001" might look like. Below is what we discovered:
In March 1944 Popular Mechanics attempted to answer this same question. What they used for suggestions included: The tip of the HOUR hand on your watch takes hardly more than one second to move .0001". You would have to split a human hair into 30 equal slices to divide it slivers .0001" thick. This helped, yet it was still difficult to visualize.
So we decided that maybe the concept of time would make it easier to understand. 52.56 mins = 1/10,000 of a year. During that same year, you will spend approximately 175,200 minutes sleeping… about 122 days.
Say we live for 100 years… .0001 of our lifetime = 3.6525 days or 87.66 hours or two 10 minute breaks per work day for a year.
Hmmm...closer... I still couldn't "see" it though.
Money ALWAYS solves everything, so we decided to try that. How about a stack of pennies scaled so that 1” = 567 inches or 47.25 ft.
1.0” = 10,000 pennies
.1 = 1000 pennies
.010 = 100 pennies (+-.005)
.001 = 10 pennies (+-.0005)
.0001 = 1 penny
Ok...I can hold a penny in my hand and look at it from the side, that is what one ten thousandth of an inch looks like... so what does 10,000 pennies look like? It's the copper colored line to the left of the person in the photograph (her right). There are eight 6 foot long clear lexan tubes containing 10,000 pennies.
In March 1944 Popular Mechanics attempted to answer this same question. What they used for suggestions included: The tip of the HOUR hand on your watch takes hardly more than one second to move .0001". You would have to split a human hair into 30 equal slices to divide it slivers .0001" thick. This helped, yet it was still difficult to visualize.
So we decided that maybe the concept of time would make it easier to understand. 52.56 mins = 1/10,000 of a year. During that same year, you will spend approximately 175,200 minutes sleeping… about 122 days.
Say we live for 100 years… .0001 of our lifetime = 3.6525 days or 87.66 hours or two 10 minute breaks per work day for a year.
Hmmm...closer... I still couldn't "see" it though.
Money ALWAYS solves everything, so we decided to try that. How about a stack of pennies scaled so that 1” = 567 inches or 47.25 ft.
1.0” = 10,000 pennies
.1 = 1000 pennies
.010 = 100 pennies (+-.005)
.001 = 10 pennies (+-.0005)
.0001 = 1 penny
Ok...I can hold a penny in my hand and look at it from the side, that is what one ten thousandth of an inch looks like... so what does 10,000 pennies look like? It's the copper colored line to the left of the person in the photograph (her right). There are eight 6 foot long clear lexan tubes containing 10,000 pennies.