wire gauge sizes for battery and fuel and so on

[CrazyGirl]

is there a place on the forum that has all the gauge sizes for detailing , thanks guys !

[kalbert]

I use this chart on Wikipedia to figure out what size wire is what. Most battery cables are around 1 gauge or so, which is about .2893", .2893/25 is about .0115", and that is about 28 or 29 gauge wire. Armed with this info I hit the jewelry isle at the craft store and pickup some bead wire on the cheap!

Some common real sizes for things are:

Battery cables 2-0 gauge wire

Fuel line 5/16-1/2"

Plug wires 5mm-8mm

Heater hoses 1/2-3/4"

Brake lines 3/16-1/4

Edited April 3, 2013 by kalbert

[blunc]

I find most battery cables in real life are about the same size as fuel line, the main difference will be that fuel line is usually silver in color (unless it's high pressure fuel injection flexible hose) and battery cables can be whatever you want as long as they don't appear silver or copper colored but are commonly red for the positive side of the battery (if it makes any difference to you) and black for the other connection.

some cars came with negative cables that had no insulation and looked like braided line that had been smashed flat so silver color would be okay for those.

this assuming you care to make it look like real cars look.

[southpier]

something brought up in another thread: wire size and insulation size are different. compensate as necessary.

Edited April 3, 2013 by southpier

[CrazyGirl]

well i bought a few packs of these in different gauge , it was cheap enough ,will see how it works out

[Ace-Garageguy]

This seems to come up every few days. Measure a real one. Divide by the denominator in the fractional scale you're working in (in 1/25 scale, divide the real measurement by 25).

I'd seriously suggest getting a cheap digital-readout caliper (about $15) and a cheap calculator (about $1) to keep on the bench if you want to save a little time and build realistic looking models. Nothing spoils an engine bay, in my opinion, more than plug wires that look like sausages and hoses as big as sewer pipes.

Figuring and knowing the actual wire diameter you need is handy sometimes, as the packages in stores are often marked as such.

A scale ruler can be helpful, and recently a board member put up a chart of relative sizes. I'll find it and post the link, unless someone beats me to it.

[Blown03SVT]

I have no ambition to be "that guy" but there is a ton of info available to you right here using the search function. I myself learned quite a bit from just searching for various topics I wanted to find answers too.

[Art Anderson]

This seems to come up every few days. Measure a real one. Divide by the denominator in the fractional scale you're working in (in 1/25 scale, divide the real measurement by 25).

I'd seriously suggest getting a cheap digital-readout caliper (about $15) and a cheap calculator (about $1) to keep on the bench if you want to save a little time and build realistic looking models. Nothing spoils an engine bay, in my opinion, more than plug wires that look like sausages and hoses as big as sewer pipes.

Figuring and knowing the actual wire diameter you need is handy sometimes, as the packages in stores are often marked as such.

A scale ruler can be helpful, and recently a board member put up a chart of relative sizes. I'll find it and post the link, unless someone beats me to it.

Another way is having a chart giving the "AWG" or American Wire Gauge sizes for copper or other non-ferrous (non-iron bearing) wire. Here's a chart of AWG wire gauge's and their equivalent diameters in decimals of an inch, as well as metric. For modeling purposes, the actual diameters are given in the two far-left hand columns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_wire_gauge#Tables_of_AWG_wire_sizes

The second thing is to know the diameter of the real thing--say plug wires, battery cables, wires attached to the likes of lights, instruments etc. That information is as close as under the hood of your (or a friend's) car.

For measuring such, nothing beats a digital caliper. These will give you on an LCD readout the size of whatever it is you want to know the thickness off, from real wires (say, plug wires or a battery cable), as well as the diameter of the small copper wire found at craft stores, or even electronic hookup wire such as found at Radio Shack. Once quite expensive, digital calipers can often be found for less than $20, use commonly available button batteries, and are very simple to use. A great modeling tool to have. Another tool that can come in handy in this situation is a common pocket calculator, which can help immeasurably when reducing 1:1 sizes to 1/25 or 1/2. Those aren't at all expensive either.

In miniature, a lot of the wiring one sees under the hood or dashboard of a real car can become seemingly "gossamer fine" when reduced to 1/25 scale, but that's the nature of scale modeling. If you measure a common spark plug lead (the outside diameter of the insulation) and find that it is say, 1/4 of an inch diameter, well that's just .010" or a very tiny bit smaller than .25mm. To many modelers that seems way too small, so this is an instance where slightly larger wire might be used, say .015". I know that can fly into the face of those who are engineers or precision machinists here, but sometimes in scale modeling, "fudging" the size of a detail ever so slightly can give an illusion of realism. Realize though, that plug leads are insulated, and the mere act of painting the that small copper wire to represent insulation will make it just a bit larger, and if nothing else, just having it in a color other than bright copper can make it seem larger all by itself.

Art

[southpier]

i guess there may be a hundred others, but i made a shortcut for this on my desktop:

http://www.math.com/students/calculators/source/basic.htm

since the workbench and desktop share the same geographical location, it works out well.