I decided to pass on a good find.
As most of you know I’m not the normal model railroader (I’m dingy) and I do my own thing with my electronic goodies. I went with battery powered LED lighting in my passenger cars using a single 3.7 volt 1000ma Lithium battery in a “power unit” (E7B for streamline cars and baggage car for HW cars).
Too accomplish his venture it was necessary to use small super flexible wire between cars. I finally found some super flex #30 AWG Silicone wire, Bntechgo Silicone Wire that fills the bill. I’ve been using it for several months and it is the best #30 gauge wire I’ve used. It’s a bit pricy but well worth the cost as far as I’m concerned. Even in small quantities’ it comes on a spool, I’ve been buying it in 100’ lenghts.
I don’t pay too much attention to actual wire gauge sizes for my DC locomotive wiring, but have found Brawa’s Part #3168 to be very useful for the wiring between locos and tenders, especially when used with mini-connectors…
The wire is about .030" in diameter over the insulation, and the braided wires within are about .013" total, when twisted together. The wire is very flexible, easy to tie in knots if you wanted to do so. It’s not on a roll, but comes in 10 metre coiled bundles. I don’t recall the actual price (fairly high), but it too is well worth it.
11 strands in the #30 and 16 strands in the #28 should make it nice and flexible. That’s not terribly expensive considering it is silicone insulation and you typically don’t use long lengths of it. The cheaper #30 wire is often made of far fewer (but larger) strands and that’s what makes it not so flexible.
For internals, a number of companies sell bundles of small diameter wire in packs with all of the basic NMRA DCC colors - I’m not a fan of extending decoder wires using plain black or red or white wire, I like to keep to the color code. Only one I seem to ever use is blue when running lights - usually I end up with EXTRA of red, black, orange, and grey which of course one NEVER throws out, but when you have to run the blue common to both the front and back of a loco, you usually need more than what comes with the decoder harness. The stuff sold by TCS and Digitrax is the very same wire they use when making the decoders, so it is thin and flexible.
I received an eBay order from China last Saturday and while the OD is a bit larger than the Bentechgo ( Bentechgo measures .025” the China wire is .031”), it is very nice wire. I received 16’ of 7 colors for $8.24 including S&H. They didn’t have the wire bundled so I had to place an individual order for each color.
I made an 8 pin NMRA extension jumper cable and I’m quit happy the way it turned out. I’m replacing the 8 pin pig tails between my steam locomotives and tenders with the NMRA colored super flex wire.
