Wire gauge comparison

[Canaan 10+ year member]

Well, I have yet to see anyone do this so I am going to try my hand at it.

Everyone talks about wire size and how this and that wire is crap. But, just how worthless are those BS brands?

Today I took scraps from quite a few brands and did a little comparison. 6inches of each brand and weighed the amount of wire per section.

***I am not sure if all the brands are Oxygen Free Copper***

Some may be steel, CCA or other. Some brands were tinned (as you can see in pics). I had no way to test copper purity, this is simply measuring mass of the 'stuff' under the casing.

This should give a little idea of just how much you are getting per foot. In the charts, I converted mass per 6inches to mass per foot.

Here are the brands I tested:

4ga

AudioPipe

Stinger HPM

Hooker WG4

Qpower

Scosche

Xscorpion

Scosche (6ga)

8ga

Xscorpion

Scosche EFX2

Pheonix Gold Inner Flow (7ga)

Old yellow color Scosche

AudioPipe

Stinger Custom Pro

American Accessory

So...on with the pics!

6" of each 4ga wire, list above is in order top to bottom.

Cross section of 4ga wire, listed right to left

Wires split and copper pulled out of casing.

This is the scale used. It is calibrated to Pennyweight (dwt, used for measuring gold weight at the shop), I converted to grams for the charts.

Click to read more...

 

[Canaan 10+ year member]

8ga wire.

6" of each wire. List in the first post top to bottom

Cross section, listed right to left.

Bunch of scraps.

Wire masses

Charts

Take this as you will. I would love to know the copper purity in these wires.

The Qpower wire #'s where pretty much what I expected. Less than half of the other wire's average size. The Scosche wire really surprised me though.

Not sure if the Scosche is even copper, also it had very low strand count in comparison to the others.

EDIT:

I would like to do a similar review on 1/0ga wire. I just did 4ga and 8ga because I had ALOT of scrap at the shop.

If anyone would like to contribute a foot of wire to a 1/0ga review, email me at Audible.Insanity@gmail.com

Thanks.

 

[S.B.C. 10+ year member]

cool review