Very interesting Chinese wires

gasgas

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You might buy some wires for, surprisingly, doing some wiring in your camper. I have. You might buy them from a source that sells Chinese wires. I have. When you strip some insulation off the wire you might see what you think is copper wire. I have.
However. When you rub the copper conductors with a fine wet and dry paper, the copper coloured strands might turn to silver . . . . . . . .it's steel, not copper. Try putting a magnet above the wire and see the wire jump up and cling to the magnet. . .:eek:
Aarrgh. So they won't carry the current you think they will. And this applies to me as well. See this interesting video on the resistance of test meter wires and other sorts.

So where do you get your copper wire from, that you can trust? I guess RS components or CPC, but they charge a lot for carriage, maybe more for carriage than the item costs.
I have a gradually diminishing box of wires that I got from a 1990's Mercedes Benz. They will be top grade copper of course and I have used some of them to rewire the junction panel in my wagon. Unfortunately I have also used some 4AWG Temu wire which claimed to be flexible. If that is flexible then so are my knees. I wonder what the conductors are made of. I must wave a magnet at them.
The best source of copper wire may be at your local car scrap yard. You can get all sorts of pretty colours in a wiring loom. Trouble is that now all cars run on a 5v CAN bus there are not many wires that carry any of the sorts of current that you want to power your moho appliances. Nor are there any scrap yards you can crawl around the cars on. Not round here, anyway.
☹️
 
About 90% of stuff bought today is fake or cheap sh=t, im finding it hard to wade through stuff these days to get good componants, the motor trade parts spring to mind, ball joints that break up within a year, ex pipes that dont last, cr-p oil filters & brake pads that dont last 6 mths.
 
There are plenty of places to get decent cable from. look for EU or UK made and it will be good quality.

If you source your cable from TEMU then you deserve to end up with a crap product fit only for the bin. What the hell do you expect!
 
We've had aluminium cable for years, lots of the power cables that are buried are Ali. There's nothing wrong with it per se but it's resistance is about twice as high so it will only carry half the current for the same guage.
If you're buying cable from a UK supplier and it doesn't state 'Copper' then you can ask but virtually all of it will be copper, avoid trying to be clever with power cables for your van by buying cheap jump leads, they WILL be Ali.
 
Steel rather than Iron is used in connectors components and cables rather than Iron and is twice as good as a conductor than Iron, So appropriately 3 times copper.
So copper = X1
Ali = X2
Steel= X3
(Roughly 😁)
 
wildebus said:
And you think that is a joke! :D
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No I don't, we went back to work after Christmas shutdown at the quarry to power failure on the rail load out section. Problem was mains cable over 6" diameter and over 150 meters above ground length had gone missing. They lit a fire under the cable then waited for it to short out so they could safely cut it.

Was a lot of copper went that time. They were lucky really as a few of the big cables were aluminium due to the copper shortage in the 70's
 
I recall cables on mainlines going missing, substations too, and there was a spate of manhole covers going too.
 
I had a Nissan Leaf electric car. One of the perks for buying it was "you can pull into any Nissan dealer and get a recharge for free". We wanted to go from Leicester to Swindon, and that's too far to go on one charge so we went via Oxford where there was a Nissan dealer.
Me: "Can we recharge our car please"
Dealer, coughing: "We would love you to Sir, but unfortunately last night our charger was stolen".
The borrowers (it's not PC to call them thieves) obviously thought the charger was a transformer, full of copper. They would break it open only to find lots of printed circuit and electronic components.
The dealer lent us a long mains lead and we connected the supplied mains-to-car charging lead and had coffees for a couple of hours so we could get from Oxford to Swindon.
I won't bother listing the reasons why we won't have another electric car, I need to go to bed some time this week . . . .
I have it on good authority that to get good inverter 12v cable the best stuff is electric welder cable.

Actually since I originally posted, I have gone to my box of wires and couldn't find any magnetic wires. Not even the reel of solder was magnetic! :ROFLMAO: That's a relief.
 
gasgas said:
I had a Nissan Leaf electric car. One of the perks for buying it was "you can pull into any Nissan dealer and get a recharge for free". We wanted to go from Leicester to Swindon, and that's too far to go on one charge so we went via Oxford where there was a Nissan dealer.
Me: "Can we recharge our car please"
Dealer, coughing: "We would love you to Sir, but unfortunately last night our charger was stolen".
The borrowers (it's not PC to call them thieves) obviously thought the charger was a transformer, full of copper. They would break it open only to find lots of printed circuit and electronic components.
The dealer lent us a long mains lead and we connected the supplied mains-to-car charging lead and had coffees for a couple of hours so we could get from Oxford to Swindon.
I won't bother listing the reasons why we won't have another electric car, I need to go to bed some time this week . . . .
I have it on good authority that to get good inverter 12v cable the best stuff is electric welder cable.

Actually since I originally posted, I have gone to my box of wires and couldn't find any magnetic wires. Not even the reel of solder was magnetic! :ROFLMAO: That's a relief.
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I would point out that having your tank punctured to drain the deisel, or cat cut off, is a damn sight more inconvenient.
 
How about having your under-floor battery punctured or stolen? Has that happened yet? Or can you just drive away not noticing a charred skeleton under the car? Just curious.
In the GPO we had safety films. I remember one where they found a hacksaw handle still with a stub of the frame attached, next to a partly sawn through cable supplying the electric power to the railway line. I think they had removed the hand - or more likely it just evaporated.
 
gasgas said:
How about having your under-floor battery punctured or stolen? Has that happened yet? Or can you just drive away not noticing a charred skeleton under the car? Just curious.
In the GPO we had safety films. I remember one where they found a hacksaw handle still with a stub of the frame attached, next to a partly sawn through cable supplying the electric power to the railway line. I think they had removed the hand - or more likely it just evaporated.
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Stealing a under floor battery pack will be a whole lot harder than draining a tank or cutting off a cat, I would think stealing the car and stripping it would be the way they go.
 
gasgas said:
How about having your under-floor battery punctured or stolen? Has that happened yet? Or can you just drive away not noticing a charred skeleton under the car? Just curious.
In the GPO we had safety films. I remember one where they found a hacksaw handle still with a stub of the frame attached, next to a partly sawn through cable supplying the electric power to the railway line. I think they had removed the hand - or more likely it just evaporated.
Click to expand...
haha they weren't proper pikes then or they would have had the bonfire underneath first :)
 
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