The standards gap

I've worked in three standards arenas. IEEE, Oasis and W3C. Another area that (quite possibly) we take for granted that standards apply is the home. Standard voltage delivered to our sockets, socket sizes, lamp holders, gas pressure, water fittings - the whole miriad of things that would make life quite difficult were it not for standards. I've recently hit two areas (hobbies for me) where IMHO there is a standards gap. I can only assume that the manufacturers are doing an NIH, guessing wrongly that customers don't care. Or hoping that they'll attract more customers for their own support products.

The first area is the channel in a router table, table saw, bandsaw etc., meant to take some supporting device. This shows a mitre guide mounted towards the left of the table. I'm told that the USA has an informal standard of two sizes for this slot, I'm reasonably sure that Europe has none. It's a nuisance when you want to buy a guide, or share a guide between two tools. The quality of mitre guides varies quite significantly, one company makes them as a seperate product. So there is a market for them. Just that there's no global standard on size. Bummer

The other one I've hit is a variant on the metric vs imperial debate. Trend are a (UK? ) manufacturer of router bits. The dovetail is needed for ... cutting dovetail joints. The UK (I may be generalizing above and beyond, but in my experience) show cutters either as simply dovetail cutters, or by specifying the three dimensions shown in the diagram on the right of the image above. It's the obtuse angle formed by the base when stood on a horizontal surface. Now take a look at this cutter. OK, the outside (max) diameter is imperial, but the angle is acute? So the Americans talk about a half inch 14° cutter. That would be 12.7mm 104° in the UK. Why is it of interest? Like many standards related things, it's only when a standard is used that it becomes of interest. A 13amp socket is of interest only to the geek inventing it until someone starts piping electricity into a thousand homes. Then people take notice. So when subsidiary products start to make use of the cutter sizes people (me in this case) start to become aware (and annoyed in this case) of the discrepency. The dovetail joint is not the easiest to make. People have come up with jigs to help automate it. The jigs mostly use a dovetail cutter. The maths of these things rely quite heavily on the cutter dimensions. If the set of cutters you use is sourced locally, then you immediately have a mismatch with the audience that doesn't share your locale. The issue then becomes either sourcing 'foreign' cutters, or adapting a design to what you have available. Either way it's a standards gap.

With 'larger' areas of interest it is pure commercial drivers that make manufacturers get together and work something out. That seems to work best, I'll quote WiFi as a good example. Look at the rate of development there. Second order standards I'd call the W3C, IEEE, Oasis set. No clear commercial benefit but lots to be gained by customers having such a standards compliant item. The benefit to the manufacturer is generally longer term and reduced hassle.

The gap is produced I guess, where islands of loose cooperation exist, such as the dovetail bit. No incentive to annoy one customer group (Eu or US) by changing the way grandfather did it.

James Clark posted on how we use names around the globe. I'd love to hear from others on how they see dovetail bits sized. Nowwhere near the same audience, but for me, a point of interest. How do you start to standardize minority islands of interest?