Keyboard,mouse and USB cable can be a source of cheap small gauge wire.
Keyboards and mice are cheap and garage sales and if you know someone in the trade you can probably get the cables from dead ones for free
Villy
Phone cable works well for this and can be had as long as you need (usually up to 1000ft.). It’s cheap too!
I haven’t used phone cable, although I have riped apart 100baseT cable. Not as small or as flexible as the mouse stuff (although great for signalling wires on the layout). I’ll have to have a look at the phone cable…
Villy
I use phone wire, too. I get it from Home Depot. I use the 4-conductor stuff for wiring turnouts and signals. Cheaper than buying 3-conductor from on-line discounters.
I work for the phone company, so the stuff is literally thrown away around here. If it’s a cat 5 run of less then 100ft., in the trash it goes (unless I’m around!). Go to construction sites for businesses and go before the drywall goes up. Thats when we like to do the cabling. Who knows, you might get lucky!
Is phone wire not 24 gauge or smaller? Does anyone know of a good (cheap) commercial source of solid or stranded 18, 20, and 22 gauge copper wire in longer spools, e.g., 100 feet or more?
Bob
I went to the local Home Depot place and got 100ft of 1 pair 14 gauge wire for like $40 or so. It wss the stuff they sell for wiring up a yard lamp. It’s not pretty, but it’s heavy gauge and it’s pretty cheap.
I got 250 ft of bell wire for $14 at Ace Hardware the other day. It was 20 gauge solid wire, with one red and one white wire. In actuallity, its 500 total feet of wire. I’m using it as feeder wires.
HD
And my layout was affordable to wire because of it!
Home Depot and Lowes generally carry 18ga (solid conductor) thermostat wire fairly cheaply. You can get a pair up to 7 conductors. For anything smaller I generally use Cat5 cable.
If you use ez track, each switch comes with a red power cable. If you link several switch controls togather, the extra red wires make nice cable.
Multi-pair telephone cables that have conductors in the pairs colour-coded like this: blue/blue-white, green/green-white, orange/orange-white are #24 or #26. The ones which have only 2 wires in them colour-coded red and green or 4 wires colour-coded red, green, black, yellow, are usually #20. The latter has been used for many years for house wiring, but they are using more of the lighter gauge 3-pair cables in houses now. As pointed out elsewhere in this post, bell wire is a good cheap source of #20 wire.
Try and find an office building being renovated, early on when they are stripping out the old stuff. Larger wire such as #14 and up is not going to be available (copper prices are skyrocketing and EVERY electric contractor saves their scrap to turn into beer money), but the old multiple pair phone cables are almost always thrown out. These are good for controling turnouts and signals. You might also find thermostat wire which is normally #18, good for track feed drops. For the main track feed bus, I bit the bullet and bought a roll of #14 in white, I can color code it with a permanent marker where needed.