My favorite BBC presenter is James May of Top Gear fame. He has several series if you wish to look them up. In this episode they race the Germans over a 10 mile course between two cities that at one time were connected with rail service. Lots of interesting contraptions, RC, Glow Engines, Lipo’s, the logic of how they powered the rails and etc… An interesting show touching on many topics any modeler would appreciate.
Wire Caculator AWG to Curcular Mils
A calculator published by the Mogami company. It is helpful to understand wire size a little better. For example, a solid core 22 gauge wire has a different overall diameter if it’s 16 strand or 32 strand or 198 strand. Don’t get fooled into thinking AWG is the diameter of your wire regardless of strand count. Actually as the strand count of multi strand wire gets higher and higher, the overall diameter of the cable gets smaller. Think of it this way, the smaller the wire, the smaller the air pockets or gaps in the bundles of copper become. In other words the wire bundle becomes more and more dense. I run into people from time to time that think it’s as simple as measuring OD of the bundle, some get quite insistent defending their theory. We’ll perhaps they are just wishful souls dreaming about how great the world would be if it was as simple as they wish it was? Below is a handy site to help you figure out what size your wire (or any wire we sell) really is. It’s not super simple but you can work it out and learn something.
If you run across any interesting calculators please forward them to me.
Wire Resistance and Voltage Drop Calculator
Jeff Lucius provides us with his Voltage Drop Calculator. An excellent site to help understand why wire size maters. If you have a 1000kv outrunner and your voltage drop across wires and connectors is .5v then your losing 500 prop RPM. Yikes!