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Wire, Cable & Bidenomics
Wire & Cable is the most boring industry you could possibly think of. I won’t bother you with any of it. I have built machines that twist wire and put a plastic jacket on it. I left that industry looking for anything more exciting. It wasn’t hard. I found the environmental industry. Mostly water and wastewater. That is simply pumps and alarms. I’m reaching the same point in this area, and I just want to retire.
One thing that should concern everyone is how the wire industry is doing. I have to say it is as dead as I have ever seen it in nearly thirty years. Keep in mind who orders wire:
-Home builders
-Medical instruments
-Military communications
-Oil well cables
-Aerospace
-Automotive
-Environmental
-Communications
You could go on to add anyone who builds anything. They all need wire. If you want to see how the economy is doing, you should check here first. Everything else is a result of companies not spending on this capital equipment. Unemployment and the cost of goods sold are all a result far down the pipeline. Stock prices are reactive, not proactive. This includes the wire companies.
To be fair to the current administration, prior election years have had a similar result. I think it has always been that nobody likes uncertainty. However, this year has been exceptionally bad. Pretty much all my quotes are on hold and I am getting minimal service work.
I only provide services for the biggest wire suppliers in the US. They are all in a deep freeze, and all in the markets mentioned above.
If anyone benefits from this information, message me and I will gladly accept a bottle of Middleton Very Rare Irish whisky.
Disclaimer: Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Trump 2024. (Please.)
Published in General
What’s the thinnest wire you’ve worked with?
The thickest?
The most number of wires in a cable?
What metals?
Important insider on the ground information. Thank you Chowderhead. Sorry that’s the best I can do. No Irish whiskey.😃
Hmm, I was never asked that before…
Thinnest, part of a heart catheter for Smiths Medical (Edit: This was Merit Medical near Galveston that made pace makers. Sorry.)
Thickest, 50mm super conductor for the ITER reactor
Most Number, Tie between old copper telephone wire and 12×12 bundles of fiber
Metals, copper, copper, copper, aluminum, glass, and silver. That’s all I can think of.
Okay, a shot of Jack will do.
Prices for house wiring are so high , HD and Lowes keep it locked in a cage . Prices are obscene compared to what they used to be .
Price just may be a major reason also .
When I was a kid, hobby kits used color-coded wire to help differentiate functions like RF detection, amplification, power supply, etc.
Vendors like Allied Radio and Lafayette Electronics sold small reels of Belden cable in various colors.
Copper sets 95% of that price and the wire price will fluctuate right along with the price of copper.
A very nice man named Tom Tash was responsible for that area at Belden in Richmond Indiana.
Don’t forget Radio Shack!
I wonder how much wire Radio Shack sold over the years.
At least people seem to be going back to copper, even if it costs more. Aluminum house wiring was never a good idea.
Kedavis, look at this Google maps of Encore Wire. Every similar roof is part of the same company. A portion of them do only aluminum. They don’t care which one you buy. Just buy. One of those buildings are Tupps brewery built by the fun owners.
Aluminum can be useful in certain areas where more care is taken etc, but I don’t think it was ever a good idea for HOUSE wiring.
Other than causing fires and too brittle it’s okay. Dissimilar junctions cause fires if not done properly. I don’t think it’s up to code in houses other than the feed and ground anymore.
On control panels that I don’t have to certify as UL508A I prefer copper clad aluminum. It’s cheap and has the same ampacity. Also you don’t have to worry about the junction. I don’t know how they do it.
The boys of Belden… very early in my career I helped rewire one television station and helped build another one from scratch. Rolls and rolls of Belden coax.
Now it’s more Ethernet cable than anything else.
They are part of the unspoken people that made America great. In the old plant in Richmond one of the guys handed me a goofy looking plug. I recognized it as a normal American plug but it was bigger. It was the prototype. They are the ones who came up with it.
Coax was nasty and hard to make. They injected gas at the beginning of the extruder and the bubbles expanded as it came out. Very messy to get going. I had a big part in CAT-6 Ethernet.
CCA can be okay for power if not mistreated. But it should never be used by audiophiles for connecting speakers.
It might not be an exciting business, but it is fascinating to learn about something that is so common and so important yet taken for granted.
Little insights like this are one of the great things about Ricochet.
I wonder if Chowderhead realizes that MOST jobs aren’t usually very exciting?
I still have their battery club cards because those are going to be gold come the apocalypse.
I was buying 12/2 Romex just before the lockdown for about $300/thousand foot roll. In a year it went to as high as $690. Good god.
It has been coming down slowly; for my current project I’m paying a little under $500, fluctuates to sometimes a bit lower.
I go through around 100,000’ on a hotel project, so I certainly notice the difference.
The bad news is that every single other component I have to provide and install is also up over 100% higher than it was pre-lockdown. (Notice I don’t say “pandemic” because the pandemic had nothing to do with it…it was all the @#$&! lockdown. Bastards.)
And imho aluminum wire gets a bad rap. It would be perfectly good for household wiring, except for a few things. One, it used to be softer and led to eventual bad connections, so a fire risk. But in 1988 the NEC required a new alloy for all aluminum wiring, which is much less a problem that way, so good in fact that the No-ox compound that we all still smear on our aluminum wire connections is completely unnecessary. We do it because inspectors like to see it anyway, sort of like crazy people and masks.
The other reason is that for the same ampacity as copper wire, the aluminum would have to be larger AWG size, slightly. But enough so that it doesn’t fit comfortably on most devices. Nobody wants to redesign the whole electrical industry, so we keep using expensive, rarer copper instead of cheap plentiful aluminum.
But it’s not like the copper wire is an expendable that gets used up by passing electricity etc. It’s more like using sturdier shingles on the roof, rather than cheaper ones. Although not a perfect comparison because shingles do need to be replaced over time.
We used to use a lot more cable:
Over the years, the technology has been placing a ton more signals on a single cable. And microwaves, satellites, etc.
And there’s the wireless revolution.
(Heh, it wasn’t too long ago that a fellow I know was immensely proud of how he had just wired his entire house for ISDN. So every room had a phone wire and a network connection. Wifi and iPhones became readily available a couple years later, obsoleting the whole thing.)
That said, more modern applications have more exotic and precise requirements, and can require more manufacturing capabilities. Fiber optics, for instance.
So perhaps cabling might be getting less boring for weird new applications.
No matter, cable orders as an economic metric makes a lot of sense.
And of course, if people are using a lot more devices, even more wireless devices, the devices to connect the wireless devices are not, themselves, wireless.
Also you have to produce the wireless devices, which depend more on circuit boards etc but there are still wires involved.
The thickest cables I ever used in my working life were television camera cables of the 1950s. NYU-TV was given a complete set of equipment by RCA in 1957; TK-15s, I think; and there were what to me were an incredible number of wires bundled in that cable. One advantage of studio equipment was, the connectors weren’t heavily stressed; once the cameras were plugged in, there was seldom reason to unplug them. The cables carried not only signal, but power and sync signals, as well as a low-fi intercom audio channel.
Every live TV show that had any camera movement had cable pullers getting the heavy things out of the way.
One oddity that impresses me to this time: camera cables were sold in matched sets. Although due to studio configurations, some cameras were always going to be farther from the connection point than others, you couldn’t economize with a shorter cable on the close-in ones, because the difference in length would show up as a hiccup in line synchronization; cutting to or from that camera would cause a momentary jump.
I sent a fair amount of my lunch money to those guys back in the day…
Fun wire facts!
The standard measure of wire gauge is not metric. And it’s not even linear. And it runs backwards.
Yet it’s worked really, really well for a very long time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_gauge
More fun wire facts!
Your typical electric guitar pickup has about 8000 turns of 42 gauge wire.
42 gauge wire is about, 0.0025, 2.5 thousandths of an inch diameter.
And 8000 turns is a little under a mile.
Just a small observation, seems to me the title of this post is crying out for an Oxford comma.
I tried that. It just didn’t look right. If I used ‘and’ instead of ‘&’ the comma would have looked better. I’ll let the editor decide if it makes it that far.
(small edit)