mwhafner. How satisfied are you with the fast cap tape measures? I had one and failed (well, I gave it a lot of stress, it failed because my fault) but the problem is the measures are a little short (not accurate).
I have a Unisaw table saw and the Biesemeyer fence has both metric and imperial. I checked the imperial with my incra rules and they are right on!. The fastcap is not accurate and always is a little short. I tried several in my local woodcraft store and all of them had the same problem (metric or imperial same problem).
stevelf Talking about converting from imperial to metric, let me tell you that I now live in USA, but my home country is El Salvador in Central America. We have a mix of different measures, we use gallons for gasoline, pints, bottles for milk, litters for water. We use pounds for weigith, KM to measure streets, manzana to measure farm land (it is an old measure from spain), we use varas (it is a little smaller than a yard). We use cm to measure but we don't use mm much, unless you require a very accurate measure at school.
So it is a big mess, you can tell, well when I came to USA, I had to face imperial and it was a big headache. I still count the little marks in my tape measure to know 5/16 or 3/32 etc. What I did to alleviate my problem is using the tape measure and forget about imperial or metric. I don't care what is larger 3/32 or 1/16, what I do is I see the big number (in this case inches) and I count or look how many marks (3 small lines or 1 medium line or whatever) and transfer that to my material. I am using my tape measure as story stick more or less.
You can do the same if you have a metric tape measure forget about what it is ( metric or imperial) and just see the numbers as a reference and count the marks. Metric tape measures are easy because they have only one type of marks between the big numbers.
Don't try to convert and make your life easier using the tape measure like that.
