The metric system wasn’t a factor, it was all economics as laid out in the article. Tooling both foreign and domestic was/is a mixture of imperial and metric to meet certain markets. The major force behind machining, automotive, did their conversions to metric back in the 1970s. The U.S. was seriously lacking in computerized machining and had plenty of time to shift to metric based machines, but the MBAs had already determined long before that they preferred overseas manufacturing at a fraction of the cost.
Machining today is heavy metric, even in the U.S. and there is still no economic way to make it all work, much like with steel production and other manufacturing concerns.
Machining today is heavy metric, even in the U.S. and there is still no economic way to make it all work, much like with steel production and other manufacturing concerns.