I am back – it’s been a week. It was an unplanned break since my son got a fever and than I got an unexpected job offer.
I own a very beautiful Gibson Les Paul guitar that I love very much. But the action – the distance between fret and string – is a bit too far off.
That is no problem because the Gibson website tells me exactly that the correct distance should be 3/64 inches! Ok. What?
First of all I am European. Inches are not unheard of and I know that one inch are 25.4 millimetres. But 3/64 inches? Come on!
Thank god for Python:
inches = "3/64" # the inch value
slash_pos = inches.find("/") + 1 # look where the slash seperates the numbers
first_num = inches[0] # get the numerator
sec_num = inches[slash_pos:] # get the denominator
dec_inch = 1 / int(sec_num) * int(first_num) # create a decimal inch value
get_mm = 25.4 * dec_inch # convert it to mm
print(inches + " inches are ""%.2f" % get_mm + " mm") # round the float to to decimals
# Output: 3/64 inches are 1.19 mm