On Mon, 06 Jun 2005 20:18:15 -0500, Joe Sensor wrote:

Pretty high percentage of air to copper? What does this mean? And there
would be nothing wrong with 1 strand!

Maybe not the best way to say it? Try this...

Agreed, there's nothing wrong with 1 strand (solid wire). The OP
mentioned 14 AWG, so we'll go with that. A solid piece of 14 AWG wire will
have a certain current carrying capacity, and also a certain resistance
and impedance for a given length. If you're going to permanently install
it from your house to your deck, It'll do fine.

If you need to move it around from time to time (get your speakers out of
the snow, for instance), you probably want something a bit less stiff. So
you run down to Home Depot (or Radio Shack, or Best Buy, or Tweeter) & get
some 14 AWG zip cord (or speaker cable). If you look close, you'll notice
that it's made up of lots (and lots) of teeney-tiny strands of wire that
fit really close together so there's not much air space between them. The
air's not particularly important, but the implication is that if you use
enough strands so they fit together tightly, you have *almost* as much
metal in a stranded wire as in a solid wire of the same gauge.

But the OP made his *approximately* 14 gauge wire from only 4 strands of
telephone wire. Since circles don't fit together very well, there's gonna
be a lot of air space in the middle. Again, it's not the air that's
important, it's the metal that's *not* in there, because it's the metal
that carries the juice (lightning notwithstanding).