Mitutoyo 182-151, Steel Rule, 450mm (1mm, 0.5mm), 3/64" Thick X 30mm Wide, Satin Chrome Finish Tempered Stainless Steel

It is astonishing! It is the first quarter of the21st century. The media is brimming with references to how important it is to promote that pitiful acronym STEM- Science Technology Engineering Math, our current president is out promoting a trade deal with circum-Pacific economic entities, and I have to get excited because I bought a really, really nice SI units ruler. No matter where I look, especially in hardware stores, or computer parts stores, or straight electronics stores, it is a rare find to see a measuring scale, or ruler, or tape measure that is mixed "metric"/English (Imperial) unit. Finding an all-metric ruler would be nothing less than a miracle. Perevious efforts to purchase a 25mm X 1mm X nnn-mm took me to web sites in Germany, where I was advised that the import fee would elevate the price of the ruler as to make it prohibitively expensive.The United States of America was supposed to have converted to SI units by 1980. There was huge opposition amongst the public, and amongst political groups, and amongst an anti-government point-of-view that declared that market forces would eventually result in a natural non-enforced conversion. That has not happened. The main reason is that the populace of the United States could not understand the necessity.This scale is the result of three purchases of all millimeter metal scales. It is sad that I am moved to celebrate something I could have bought in a good hardware or tool-store in Japan.Mean time, we need to keep our children and workers to stay interested in STEM, and keep on promoting the increase of the "American" manufacturing economy. Gee we can bring back manufacturing, but it might be a good idea to manufacture products that are built to physical units used by the rest of the Pacific rim economies.Great ruler by the way...

Great quality accurate within half a tho overall length