No, that’s not a misprint. I really did mean “mil“.
I recently came across an online ad for duct tape that listed this information under “roll length”.
60 Yds.-180 Ft.-55 Meters
Yes, a standard roll of duct tape or gaffers tape is 60 yards, or 180 feet, but that is not the same as 55 meters. 55 meters is longer than 60yds. Just a little longer, but nonetheless, it helps me make a point.
Tape manufacturers seem to constantly mix standard and metric measurements at will, usually to serve their own purposes.
The width of a roll of gaffers tape was two inches for decades. Simple, easy to remember, and true. About ten years ago, all the major manufacturers of this and other cloth tapes changed to a metric standard for width, and reduced the width of a roll of tape to 48 millimeters. The change was hardly noticeable on a single roll of tape but when you spread that size reduction over literally millions of rolls made by a major manufacturer in a single year, the difference was huge. It adds up to almost a full roll of actual tape in a case of 24 rolls.
By using the metric standard for width they reduced the roll size by 4%, but by not adopting the metric measure of 55 meters for length, they didn’t have to increase the roll length.
To confuse things further, the thickness of tape is measured in “mils” with “mil” meaning a thousandth of an inch. Here they mix standard (inches) and metric (thousandths).
If you’ve got any good ideas on how to standardize this system, let me know.
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