I am thinking of using speaker wire (gage around 20) to wire my track drops to the busses (14 gage). Does anyone have opinion(s) on this?
Thanx. Bill
Bill,
I model in N scale and used 14 gauge for the buss as you did. For the track leads, I used 22 gauge wire.
The draw isn’t that great to require larger gauge wire than 20. The key is having it heavy enough for the load and small enough to disappear when the rail is painted and the ballast goes down.
When I built my layout, I put rail leads on every other piece of flex track. I haven’t had any detrimental effects from this, but I’d put one to each piece of flex track if I did it today.
Should work fine. I used 20 for my drops and 12 for the buss and it’s working fine. Try and use color coded to make life easier.
I used 18 gauge speaker wire for the drops on my DCC layout. I bought a 100’ roll of “Architectural Speaker Cable” from Parts Express as it was cheaper than anywhere else and its two conductor color coded wire in a PVC sheath. It was less than $15.00. You can strip away the sheath if you don’t want it. This is a great place to buy electrical items (power supplies, etc). Try www.parts-express.com.
Thanks guys. Just wanted to know if I was setting myself up for an electrical problem with the gage mismatch.
Bill
To realy find out do a small part and do the quarter test to be shure. If you keep the feeders as short as posible you shouldnt have a problem. On feeders farther than 6 to eight inches from the buss I use the 14g to lengthen the feeder. Most of my feeders are 22g that are only 5 inches long or shorter.
Pete