We recently received a batch of custom cable (7,500 meters of it!) that has too hard and stiff a jacket for us to use. We had failed to specify the jacket durometer, so the vendor used whatever they had.
We then got a sample of a much less stiff cable, and this vendor specified "Shore A 68 Durometer". I got doing some research on this and it's pretty interesting: http://www.npl.co.uk/force/guidance/hardness/rubber.html Essentially you have an important material property that is so far from any fundamental physical property such as mass or length that it is specified purely empirically -- put a special indenting tool on the material and see how far it dents. Nonetheless, the web site above does spec everything in metric units. More interesting info at http://www.machinist-materials.com/hardness.htm, comparing the different hardness scales. Even this US site is pretty much all metric. Jim P.S. anyone need 7.5 km of cheap ethernet-ready cable? Jim Elwell [EMAIL PROTECTED] 801-466-8770 www.qsicorp.com
