Hi there, I just found this and wanted to send a few clarifications
First: We build the ELS since 11 years now, it started as a hobby project and evolved with the time. As we only served the german hobby "market" we never had reason to use imperial units, as these are, to be honest, a real PITA to work with, sorry for thge rough language, but anyone familiar with Metric can tell you that. So we never considered that, also because it is not as easy as it sounds to show the 4-5 digit numbers on the small display, you get more rounding errors you need to adress etc. And then you want not only "0,2187" but of course you would like to see "7/32".
We started to do serious business with the control 8 years ago, and since then we made several thousand ELS controls, and ship them worldwide now. Our main market is Germany/EU, and a few go to the USA, but only a very few. In fact, we currently hardly can make more, the production takes its time, and we have several other projects running. Also, some parts are very hard to get, and not in high quantities. Microcontroller for example are still very scarce. That's why we never seriously tried to enter the US market, we just don't really have the time for it, it's not just sending a package over, if we really want to sell serious amounts of the control we would need to do a lot more as we do now. Regulations, rules, laws, certification etc. etc.
I would like to mention, that we never received a single ELS back from a customer because of him being dissatisfied. The number of defects in 11 years can also be counted on one hand.
We also clearly state on the website and in the shop that the ELS4 is currently metric only. It does not have tables for threads, as these are quite useless, you often run into a thread not in the table, therefore we made it completely open, you can cut ANY thread with the ELS4, metric of imperial, tapered, multistart etc. as long as it has a pitch you can cut with the given mechanics. Simple.
However, we have the imperial software almost ready, it is being tested at the moment, but there are still a few things I do not like, as the abovementioned missing fractures, which is quite hard to do. In fact we had to change the software completely to have imperial units, that was several weeks of work and testing. And to be honest, I still do not understand why someone would voluntarily want to work with this system, it has so many disadvantages, but that is my opinion
So, Imperial is coming soon, we need to iron out a few more wrinkles, then we will post it as beta version which anyone can try. Of course the updates are free, as always.
Another thing:
The last I saw on the Rocketronics website is that they still only have metric software. Now I dont mind profit minded ventures such as this, but the way this product developed without any intention of serving the vast imperial market is rather insulting.
The imperial market is rather small, tbh. Even in the USA the industry uses metric. I would guess that 5% of our customers would use imperial if we had it ready.
"The situation is however not as clear-cut as this. In the United States, for example, the metric system is the predominant system of measure in certain fields such as automobile manufacture even though customary units are used in aircraft manufacture. In the United Kingdom, metric units are required for almost all regulated use of units of measure except for a few specifically exempt areas such as road signs, speedometers and draught beer. Metrication is also all but complete in the Commonwealth countries of Australia, India, New Zealand and South Africa; metrication in Canada has displaced the imperial system in many areas."
Rocketronics might wish to add that blurb to their ordering page for the pro version
It is stated on the ordering page.
Then they also blame regulators for not being able to ship their product to some EU nations. They claim it costs too much to meet packaging requirements.
That is for real, some EU countries have too many hurdles to climb, we simply are not allowed to deliver there without paying a lot of money, in some small countries up to 600 Euro a year plus many more things, that is not worth it. In Poland for example you need a registration number (Pesel) besides that, but you can only get it in Poland, there is no way to get it outside of Poland, I tried and failed. We risk jailtime if we send goods without that number, it's sad, but real. Greece is the same, very expensive, and we need an expensive local legal representative etc. etc. The EU sometimes does some very stupid things. Would you expect they build an integral EU market, and then let every country set up their own rules on packaging? They really did. So we pay our fees in those countries where we send enough packages to make up foir the fees, the rest cannot receive anything from us. We pay several thousand euros per year just for recycling about 150 cartons in EU countries, it's an insane thing, but that's the law.
