six-point socket II said:
I think part of the explanation might be the question of who put that set together, Festool Germany or Festool USA.
If the standard sets come from the the same supplier that the metric ones come from, and Festool USA imports these, my wild guess would be that whomever was the project manager for these sets, on our side of the big pond, simply didn't know any better - and the supplier probably didn't know about it either or didn't want to point out the importance of the 7/16" size for whatever reason.
Additionally, no one felt the need to check the contents for plausibility pre-release/ no one with knowledge about common/important standard/imperial sizes checked the content pre-release.
Sadly it happens all the time when companies stray away from their core competency.
Kind regards,
Oliver
I get what you are saying Oliver, "to a degree". Sure, they may completely space on the importance of one particular size, but the entire run goes in 1/32" increments, up to 13/32". Then it skips 2 and the last one is redundant? Come on.
I was really trying to be on their side with this, thinking that they were just "saving space" by reducing duplicates. Many "cheap" combination SAE/Metric sets will drop 16mm because 5/8" is so close, even more sets will drop 19mm because 3/4" is so close. Most of them neglect the 5/16" and 8mm though? 7/16" and 11mm are within .004" of each other too, so thinking that's where they were going, I checked the others that I previously listed. Nope, they are all there, so that's not it.
I just don't get it? It's like a poor language translation in a document, where even one native speaker would see it immediately.
Proof-read, double-check, and run preview tests by someone other than those directly involved.
Personally, I would like to see an acknowledgement of this by the higher-ups and some kind of opps, sorry, here's a 7/16" socket for your troubles. Matching, of course.