On Thursday 03 Feb 2005 15:34, James R. Frysinger wrote: > Within IEEE SCC14 and within the IEEE/ASTM Joint Committee for maintaining > SI 10, the matter of AWG sizes for electrical wire has come up a number of > times. > > I think that I successfully tracked down the source document as being ASTM > B258-02. Work is in progress to confirm that this is indeed the source and > not a parallel standard, merely supporting the definitions provided by > another source. > > A related question is this. Who in the world (literally), uses the AWG to > describe the sizes of electrical wire? I imagine that Canadians and perhaps > Mexicans might. I have seen mixed reports on Europe from various IEEE > working group chairs; some say Europeans use AWG and some say they use only > diameters in millimeters or areas in millimeters squared. Do any of our > members here outside the U.S. have any insight on this? > > Jim
Jim: Since the 70s (or maybe even late-60s, since I have access to some 'metrication in engineering' documents from the time) electrical wire has been measured by square millimetres (and sold by the metre). However, I am sorry to say that with the arrival of widespread comms networking, that AWG is the usual way of describing Cat 5 etc. cable. (Even more bizarrely, such cable can be bought from European manufacturers in 100 m etc. reels, but the largest reel is '305 m'!! I can find no rational explanation for this. -- Chris KEENAN UK Metric Assoc.: metric.org.uk
