Tweet
What's your favorite heater wire?
I recently had to service an amp that had a very lame heater wiring layout, where the amp suffered from lots of loop hum. After tightening up the heater wires the wire wasn't long enough to be recycled so I had to restart from scratch. Murphy's Law being what it is, I only noticed that I was running out of heater wire after I had started the project, so I had to make-do with what I had on-hand.
My problem was that the hook-up wire that I had on-hand for wiring the heaters was just awful. for the mini noval tubes I used 22ga stranded type UL-1015 wire with a heavy PVC jacket. The PVC jacket was so heavy relative to the wire gauge that I couldn't keep the wire in a tight helix, it always wanted to unwind. The stranded wire wasn't helping either. It was impossible to get the helix to stay in a tight wind unless I periodically anchored it to the chassis.
I'm going order some new wire so I thought I'd ask for recommendations. I don't like the stock that I've picked up from CED so I'm hoping you can recommend other suppliers.
So what are you using? Solid or Stranded? PVC or Cloth? I'm like to use a heavier gauge for the power amp and a lighter gauge for the preamp. I'm particularly interested in solid wire with a jacket that isn't overly thick. If there's a vendor that's got a particularly decent wire I'd love to hear about it. IME these Type-1015 PVC jackets only add to the headaches.
Thanks.
I recently had to service an amp that had a very lame heater wiring layout, where the amp suffered from lots of loop hum. After tightening up the heater wires the wire wasn't long enough to be recycled so I had to restart from scratch. Murphy's Law being what it is, I only noticed that I was running out of heater wire after I had started the project, so I had to make-do with what I had on-hand.
My problem was that the hook-up wire that I had on-hand for wiring the heaters was just awful. for the mini noval tubes I used 22ga stranded type UL-1015 wire with a heavy PVC jacket. The PVC jacket was so heavy relative to the wire gauge that I couldn't keep the wire in a tight helix, it always wanted to unwind. The stranded wire wasn't helping either. It was impossible to get the helix to stay in a tight wind unless I periodically anchored it to the chassis.
I'm going order some new wire so I thought I'd ask for recommendations. I don't like the stock that I've picked up from CED so I'm hoping you can recommend other suppliers.
So what are you using? Solid or Stranded? PVC or Cloth? I'm like to use a heavier gauge for the power amp and a lighter gauge for the preamp. I'm particularly interested in solid wire with a jacket that isn't overly thick. If there's a vendor that's got a particularly decent wire I'd love to hear about it. IME these Type-1015 PVC jackets only add to the headaches.
Thanks.