cvairwerks
Staff Sergeant
How would you handle the problem that almost most every machine tool in the Packard and other factories were in inch configuration? Almost every machinist out there worked in inch, and had nothing but inch micrometers, dial gauges, calipers, indicators, last words and so on. It was already hard enough to get small tools. For some things it was so bad, that the government put the word out to amateur radio operators to turn in every electric meter that they could, so that they could be repurposed for the war effort.To me the biggest stupidity that both the US and Aus engaged in during ww2 was the total redrawing of imported designs. Packard wasted untold manhours redrawing all the Merlin blueprints to US standard when it would have been far simpler to train the production staff to read and use the RR drawings. These were all new hire staff and had to be trained in reading the US blueprints so sticking with the UK prints would have been easier and faster and have no chance of the inevitable conversion errors that arise when converting mm to US inches etc. Likewise training their draftsman to work with the RR drawing standards would have taken a minute fraction of the time taken to redraw every blueprint.