User Manual
This document was written by Chris Hansen.
For more information, or to purchase the products shown here, please visit our web site:
www.hansenhobbies.com
about is if you need to be concerned about the weight of the wire. Last, keep in mind that 22-24AWG wire is just plain easier to work with than
anything much thicker or thinner.
One of the most irritating things you’ll find when buying servo wire is that the listed wire sizes never seem to be consistent with what
somebody else is selling. I learned this right away and got frustrated because no resellers seemed to be labeling their wire sizes correctly –
this makes it impossible for the customer to know what their buying. I decided to purchase some servo wire from several popular suppliers and
take measurements so people could make comparisons. In the table below I list the source, part number, seller’s description, measured
resistance (in ohms per 1,000ft), and the effective American Wire Gauge (AWG). To determine the AWG, I took the measured resistance and
indexed it to this chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_wire_gauge, then rounded the results to the nearest tenth. Of course, you’ll
never hear anyone say “twenty five point two gauge wire”, but these numbers will serve well for the purposes of comparison. I also made a
sincere, but less scientific attempt at rating the flexibility of each wire. I also had a helper perform the flexibility test and we averaged our
scores.
Source Part Number
Stated
Gauge
Strand
Count
Ohms per
1000ft
Measured
AWG
Weight
(oz/ft) / (g/m)
Flexibility
Hansen Hobbies HH-SW_SI20 20 99 10.50 20.1 0.222 20.6
Hansen Hobbies HH-SW_EC20 20 21 10.35 20.1 0.251 23.3
Hansen Hobbies HH-SW_EC22 22 17 15.55 21.8 0.182 16.9
Hansen Hobbies HH-SW_EC24 24 11 24.53 23.8 0.131 12.1
Hansen Hobbies HH-SW_EC26 26 7 39.30 25.8 0.096 8.9
Hansen Hobbies HH-SW_EC28 28 7 60.97 27.7 0.074 6.9
Hansen Hobbies HH-SW_DX22 22 60 18.97 22.7 0.156 14.5
Hansen Hobbies HH-SW_DX26 26 30 36.86 25.5 0.092 8.5
Hansen Hobbies HH-SW_DX28 28 20 52.88 27.1 0.052 4.8
Radical RC W3S-22FJ 22 60 16.64 22.1 0.152 14.1
Radical RC W3S-26FJ 26 30 33.57 25.1 0.095 8.8
Radical RC W3S-30FJ 30 20 50.21 26.9 0.058 5.4
Servo City SW24J 24 30 35.87 25.4 0.096 8.9
Servo City SW22JT 20 60 19.26 22.7 0.162 15.1
Servo City SW22JT-untwisted 20 60 17.92 22.4 0.151 14.0
Hitec / Tower PN 54804 / LXN661 24 40 25.16 23.9 0.114 10.6
Hitec / Tower PN 57417 / LXPWC1 20 60 16.45 22.1 0.148 13.7
As you can see, the listed wire gauge is not always dependable. The lesson to be learned is that you should probably pay no attention to the
listed gauge and just look at the wire resistance. If your supplier isn’t able to measure it for you, ask them to send me a sample at least 10ft
long and I’ll measure it and add it to the chart here! Our Economy Wire aside, there’s good consistency among wires of similar strand counts.
So if you have 60 strand wire, it’s likely close to 22.3AWG, 30 strands is likely close to 25.4AWG, and 20 strands is likely close to 27AWG.
I tested one type of twisted wire and you can see that when untwisted the length increased and therefore the ohms/ft went down and
decreased it’s effective gauge. I feel the change would have been more significant, but even after untwisting the wire it still didn’t want to
relax out to it’s natural length.