on 2005-02-04 02.34, James R. Frysinger at [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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
Dear Jim, My only experience with wire sizes was when I worked on the development of a new Australian piano in the late 1980s. We were confronted with wires from the USA and from England and Europe that were specified in several different gauge sizes. I recommended to the piano maker that he should specify and order wires in micrometres and then check these when they arrived by also measuring them in micrometres (with a micrometer). This recommendation had several advantages: 1 The specification and the order matched the diameter of the wire supplied. 2 Calculations were much easier as no conversion factors had to be applied. 3 By using micrometres only, there were no fractions (vulgar or decimal) needed on any piano component drawings. Wires that were more than a millimetre (1.2 millimetres for example) were simply specified in whole numbers of micrometres (1200��m in this case). After the piano maker did this he discovered that wire suppliers are able to supply wire in micrometres � most used micrometres during the design and manufacture of their wires anyway. They then changed their factory sizes to gauge numbers for conservative historical reasons. The Australian piano maker has been using micrometres for about 15 years with no issues or problems related to metric specifications. Cheers, Pat Naughtin Geelong, Australia 61 3 5241 2008 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metricationmatters.com This email and its attachments are for the sole use of the addressee and may contain information that is confidential and/or legally privileged. This email and its attachments are subject to copyright and should not be partly or wholly reproduced without the consent of the copyright owner. Any unauthorised use of disclosure of this email or its attachments is prohibited. If you receive this email in error, please immediately delete it from your system and notify the sender by return email.
