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THE AMERICAN WIRE GAUGE

1 / 3 · mockup · corridor-glass

THE AMERICAN WIRE GAUGE

forty-four sizes derived from two diameters and one law of progression

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Standard$1.50

Payment and email are handled by Paddle. The download link arrives by email — no account, no password.

Formats
A4 · A3 · A2
What you get
Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject
units · reference · study

The gauge number rises as the wire gets thinner: it counts drawing operations. The diameters are from NBS Handbook 100 and the other columns are computed from them; resistance is for a solid annealed copper conductor at 20 °C.

THE ONE ROW THE REST IS COUNTED FROM

The source advises keeping one row in mind — No. 10: a tenth of an inch across, 10,000 circular mils of section, one ohm per 1,000 feet. The true figures are 0.1019 inch, 10,384 mils and 0.9988 ohm — errors of 1.90 %, 3.84 % and 0.12 %.

Everything else is then counted from it: three numbers higher, twice the resistance; three numbers lower, half of it. Which is why No. 20 already comes to about 10.1 ohm per the same 1,000 feet.

On the sheet

  • The gauge number rises as the wire gets thinner: it counts drawing operations. The diameters are from NBS Handbook 100 and the other columns are computed from them; resistance is for a solid annealed copper conductor at 20 °C.
  • Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
  • Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

  • Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
  • All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
  • White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
  • Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
  • No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 7 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

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