Wire gauge comparison

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.

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.

there any way to bench test a wire? i mean there has to be a way

Wow, Nice data.
I loled at the graphs...Great fortiude.
I would be willing to paypal towards some 0 testing.
I could sponser a foot.

So 4ga Scosche isn't THAT bad?

---

quote:

So 4ga Scosche isn't THAT bad?

---

I'm not to sure, not even that sure its really copper.

The stuff I had was pretty old, and its was the EFX2 purple casing stuff. Haven't seen it around in awhile.

Hit me w/ an email.
audible.insanity@gmail.com



What really drove me to do this test is that the last order few orders I made w/ Xscorpion, it seemed like the 4ga was getting smaller. I had to check. As I expected, it was pretty small...I have yet to run into a problem w/ it though on 1200w or so systems. Did a DDm1a's w/ it and no problems....the 1/0 has always been pretty beafy though. I have a hard time getting it into my IA 20.1, DDZ2Hv and Cory's M3's. Everything else the company makes is great, had no problems anywhere with them, awesome dealer support and shipping shipping prices w/ big orders.

The real test would be resistance over a 1000ft strand, but I doubt anyone would be willing to send me that much 1/0 for testing...lol

I would love to see a 1/0 test. Definitely have to test knukonceptz. I will even send it if I have extras after I do the big3.