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MG TD TF 1500 - Temperature gauge units

Hello,
I'm wondering why the TD temperature gauge is in °C ?
very strange to have °C et psi on the same gauge !

I saw a fahrenheit gauge on an MGA.
An historical reason ?

Laurent.
LC Laurent31

It looks nice so they are both end at 100. :-)

Good observation. Not sure what motivated them to do that. Probably totally confused the USA market.
Christopher Couper

My friend's '51 TD gauge is C and my '53 is F. I wonder if there was a change over from C to F or if the two were just randomly distributed throughout the TD production run.

What was the standard (or perhaps I should say popular*) unit of temperature in Jolly Old England in the '50s?

Thanks.

Jud

* Here in the USA the "legal" unit of temp is C but nobody but scientists and engineers (and only some of them) use C. The rest of us stubbornly cling to F as we do with feet, inches, miles, quarts, gallons, pounds and ounces.
J. K. Chapin

From memory metrication didn’t really gain much of a foothold in schools till the mid 60s. First as cgs (centimetre/gram/second) then the SI (System International - with a French accent as they developed the system) with metres/kilograms/seconds as the preferred units. Science subjects changed first although some of my senior exams (1968) in other subjects were still in imperial units!
As an aside, Lord Nuffield (heard of him?) endowed a new approach to science teaching in the late 60s and that was instrumental in the change.
I emigrated to Australia in ‘74 and went through the whole metrication process again so can claim to be pretty well bilingual.
Chris
C I Twidle

Metrication is an interesting subject for me as an Australian living in the USA.
44 years in aviation saw very little change, and why should there be anyway, altitude is in feet for most of the world and it works. Distance is nautical miles and speed in knots.
Runway length is in meters but expressed in feet on the performance charts that use Centigrade for temperature.
Pressure settings for altimeters is in hectopascals in most countries and inches of Hg in the USA. The USA did convert to Centigrade for temperature in aviation, much to the chagrin of US pilots.
The USA is stuck on the Imperial system, it would be impossible to change, a lot of the population have trouble with addition so using multiplication to convert units would be impossible. And the USA is in step, it is the rest that are not!
I was a young adult when Australia went metric so it was no issue to be able to convert back and forth. Still to this day when driving in Canada I don’t have to think twice.
My father-in-law could not handle the km/hr conversion so I put 2 marks on his speedo, my father was more math agile and had no issue with changeover.
I operated B747 aircraft in kilos and pounds, still to this day I remember 379,202Kg being the maximum taxi weight, a number that just stuck in my head.
My TF1500 is in degrees C and PSI.
The one that made no sense is fuel economy in liters/100km, just cannot figure that one out.
I am old enough to remember when Australia went decimal on currency, February 14, 1966.

Peter
P G Gilvarry

"In come the dollars in come the cents,
to replace the pounds, the shillings and the pence,
dad, da da da, dah,
On the 14th of February 1966 !."

One of the most successful TV jingles/promotions to that time in Australia.

Tony
A L SLATTERY

When I was sailing depths were still in feet but you had to check your charts sometimes ‘cos if the subscript/decimal depths never went above a 5 then you could be dealing with fathoms!
At least nautical miles and knots make sense as they are directly related to the earth’s circumference at the equator.
C I Twidle

Pounds / dollars in Aust. 66 yes but I think measurements etc were phased in 1970 - 88

One thing that 'still' gets mixed up is the word centigrade for temperature

Celsius - Temperature
Centigrade -Degree of Angle

The one that has got me confused is the use of percentage for measuring a slope as in Tour of France bike race you see for example 30% slope and think ,crikey that's steep but in fact 100% =45 degrees
How can you get 100% out of 45 deg
OK it's 100% of 50% of 90 deg-------------???
and the biggy
90 degrees = 3,798,411.48 Percent of a Slope

how's that work
William Revit

Apparently centigrade was commonly used for temperature but officially became Celsius in 1948 to (try to) avoid confusion between temperature and angle.

If you go up 10m when you go along 10m you have:
10/10*100 as a % =100% = 45 degrees

To get a 30% slope you would need to go up 10m in roughly 33m
10/33 *100 = 30% or roughly 17degrees

For a 90degree slope you would need to be going straight up so it’s not 3,798,411 but infinity as you would have to divide your 10m rise by 0m and * by 100. Your calculator would quite sensibly spit the dummy when you ask it to divide by 0 and you would have to be one hell of a cyclist to ride up that slope!

I think the steepest hill I have driven up in the UK was 1 in 4 which gives:
1/4*100 =25% or roughly 14 degrees.
C I Twidle

Great stuff guys. Thanks.

Per cent slope always bugged me also even though I understand the calculation. Per cent just doesn't seem to be the proper unit to use for slope or angle.

In chemistry and physics in college in 1964-68 we used CGS and centigrade (never used Celsius and never knew that "centigrade" could refer to angles) but in engineering at the same time we used Imperial. Remember the Hubbell telescope needed corrective lenses because of that.

The steepest mountain drives around here are 7-10% but feel more like 30degrees.

Still don't know when the gauges were changed to or from C to F or if both coexisted throughout the production run.

Jud
J. K. Chapin

Let's get this thread back on topic! :-)

"My friend's '51 TD gauge is C and my '53 is F. I wonder if there was a change over from C to F or if the two were just randomly distributed throughout the TD production run."

I need to know when this happened. My late 1952 has the metric temp (car 19629). We need more late 52/early 53 people to weigh in on what scale their temp gauge is.
Christopher Couper

Thanks guys,
My TD is 29133, late 53, °C.

Another amusing fact : the MGA gauge is F with round numbers except for 212 that replaced 210.
Water always boils at the same temperature regadless of the units !


Laurent.
LC Laurent31

I should have included that my friend's '51 is car number TD10879 (degrees C) and my '53 is 25009 (degrees F). Of course, who knows how many times POs may have replaced the gauges.

Jud
J. K. Chapin

My car, TD10855, didn't have a water temperature gauge, just an oil pressure gauge. I replaced it with a combination gauge (100 psi/100°C). Bud
Bud Krueger

This thread was discussed between 26/05/2019 and 27/05/2019

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