Why is it so hard to find tracer hookup wire assortments?

[watchmaker]

AliExpress, Amazon, internet, Jameco.  Finally found 5 foot peices on ebay.

[jonpaul]

scrap telephone cable, 2/4/87/50 pair #28 ga gray jacket.

With most telecom going woreless m,ny old copper and key suystems are now scrapped.

Everywire has a dstinct 2 color mark

Have boxes of these that were discarded.


j

[TimFox]

Try Surplus Sales of Nebraska for tracer Teflon wire:  https://www.surplussales.com/Wire-Cable/Wire4.html

[Wallace Gasiewicz]

I bought about 100 feet of New AT&T  Telephone Plenum Wire (eight single strnd wires) for $15 at my favorite electronics supply, Salvation Army. 
This is very good copper wire for lots of applications I think it is 24 Guage.

[Jwillis]

Not sure what you mean by "Tracer wire". The only tracer wire that I'm aware of is used for locating underground utilities. I imagine it's difference in terminology.
If you mean striped wire then try MilSpecWiring

[Stray Electron]

    I'm assuming that you mean hookup wire that has color coded insulation and with a color stripe so that you can identify individual wires.  That type wire isn't as common as it once was. Today a lot of the Mil Spec wiring is often all the same size and type wiring with the identical color insulation and wire numbers are printed directly onto each wire or it has plastic or metal bands with identifying numbers installed at intervals.

     But check out the mil surplus stores such as Skycraft in Orlando. They have hundreds of reels of the stuff and they sell it by the foot.

       I don't know what lengths you need but I buy a lot of Mil Surplus test stations and tear them down for the component parts and I always look for items that have long cables that I can salvage.

   The old 54 pair cable that the TelCos used to use for central office wiring was great for things like this.  Evey wire pair had a unique color combination but the conductor was rather small (22 gauge?) and was solid core.

[BrokenYugo]

Old cat5 cables?

[watchmaker]

    I'm assuming that you mean hookup wire that has color coded insulation and with a color stripe so that you can identify individual wires.  That type wire isn't as common as it once was. Today a lot of the Mil Spec wiring is often all the same size and type wiring with the identical color insulation and wire numbers are printed directly onto each wire or it has plastic or metal bands with identifying numbers installed at intervals.

     But check out the mil surplus stores such as Skycraft in Orlando. They have hundreds of reels of the stuff and they sell it by the foot.

       I don't know what lengths you need but I buy a lot of Mil Surplus test stations and tear them down for the component parts and I always look for items that have long cables that I can salvage.

   The old 54 pair cable that the TelCos used to use for central office wiring was great for things like this.  Evey wire pair had a unique color combination but the conductor was rather small (22 gauge?) and was solid core.

Thank  you all So it is not me!  Stray Electron knows precisely what I am looking for.  Apparently  my age is showing again.    This stuff was in every gauge and used extensively in tube wiring.  I guess these damned PCBs and ICs killed that business. 

Thank you for the leads (pun intended).  Wife would kill me if I bought stuff for salvage though.

[tooki]

Wire with multicolor insulation is still available here and there. I think you sabotaged your search by using nonstandard terminology. I’ve never encountered the term “tracer wire” even in old electronics texts, and even Stray Electron was reading between the lines to know what you meant.

The other question is whether you’re after solid or stranded wire. Multicolor insulation was mostly used back when solid wire was king for internal wiring. Nowadays we do a lot less point-to-point wiring, instead tending to use connectors and PCBs, and when we do use wire, it’s more likely to be stranded.

At my old work, we had dozens and dozens of reels of solid wire, mostly 0.6 and 0.8mm diameter (22 and 20AWG), in all kinds of multicolor insulation. (In fact, when we needed it, it was single-color that we struggled to find!) That wire was mostly from the 70s, IIRC. My boss let me take home “a few” reels, so I now have a literal lifetime+ supply of solid wire. If you ever come to Switzerland, you can have some. Or if you are near Maryland, I’ll bring you some the next time I visit! :p

[watchmaker]

Wire with multicolor insulation is still available here and there. I think you sabotaged your search by using nonstandard terminology. I’ve never encountered the term “tracer wire” even in old electronics texts, and even Stray Electron was reading between the lines to know what you meant.

The other question is whether you’re after solid or stranded wire. Multicolor insulation was mostly used back when solid wire was king for internal wiring. Nowadays we do a lot less point-to-point wiring, instead tending to use connectors and PCBs, and when we do use wire, it’s more likely to be stranded.

At my old work, we had dozens and dozens of reels of solid wire, mostly 0.6 and 0.8mm diameter (22 and 20AWG), in all kinds of multicolor insulation. (In fact, when we needed it, it was single-color that we struggled to find!) That wire was mostly from the 70s, IIRC. My boss let me take home “a few” reels, so I now have a literal lifetime+ supply of solid wire. If you ever come to Switzerland, you can have some. Or if you are near Maryland, I’ll bring you some the next time I visit! :p

Thanks Tookii.  I sure as Hell would like to spend another year in Switzerland.   Figured out how to live at normal prices and how to use the people at the station to plan itineraries.  Also loved the way room bookings worked. One website for all.  All very rational!

Anyway, I am now in NH.  But thank you!

I was reading about your design for the high-energy interlock.  I think you and others are very generous to spend time keeping an eye on the sandbox while you really love the esoteric bits of EE.

And you are right.  Somewhere along the way "tracer wire" disappeared from the lexicon of electronics.  Now it is called automotive striped wire! And 50 years ago it was referred to as tracer/trace wire.  It was used a lot in point-to-point circuits.

[tooki]

Thanks Tookii.  I sure as Hell would like to spend another year in Switzerland.   Figured out how to live at normal prices and how to use the people at the station to plan itineraries.  Also loved the way room bookings worked. One website for all.  All very rational!

”Rational” is certainly an adjective that applies to a lot of things here!

Train station personnel are quickly going the way of the dodo; other than at the main stations in major cities, most local stations have had their counters closed entirely. Online itinerary searches and apps have made them mostly obsolete.

IMHO the biggest innovation in the ticketing is the app-based “check-in ticket”, where you don’t actually buy a ticket in advance, but rather check in and out in the app as you start and end trips. The app uses GPS to see which routes you traveled, and at the close of business at around 5am, it calculates the cheapest ticket for the trips you made that day and bills you for that. Absolutely fantastic when your travel plans are unclear, so you don’t have to ponder “should I get a day pass for today?” It also knows what month/year passes you have and only buys an “extension” for the part you didn’t have.

And while Switzerland has never been a cheap place, but lemme tell you, with the inflation in USA, the difference in cost of living is smaller than ever. I live in the biggest city in Switzerland, and there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that I could rent an apartment as big or as nice, for the same money, in any large US city. (I used to live in/near Baltimore, and nowadays even Baltimore rent is higher than what I pay in Switzerland! o_O ) My deodorant costs 2.5x as much in USA as here, the exact opposite of how it was just 10 years ago. Traveling in Switzerland as a tourist, especially lodging, is still quite expensive. But living here is definitely cheaper relative to income, and it’s approaching the point where it’s cheaper in absolute terms, too! 

[watchmaker]

I loved how train doors aligned with connecting trains and the Nachstahl/Procaine Arre (?)  at Bienne/Biel!

And on weekends (this is said tongue in cheek); I loved the "boy scouts" in full kit with their automatic weapons going for service weekends.  I NEVER felt unsafe in Switz around guns because everyone was trained to the same standards!  In the US, ANY yahoo can get a fully automatic weapon.

In Switz, you know what is expected and what to expect from others.  Just go in the Post Office one time!

[TimFox]

Tracer wire:
The main dining room in a classy hotel in downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico has an interesting wall decoration, based on winding different colors of tracer wire and ribbon cable around long tubes running on the walls above the banquette seating:  the result is separate bands orthogonal to the long direction of the horizontal tubes..
Presumably, their main source was surplus wire from nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory.
It co-ordinates nicely with the Southwestern decor of the hotel.

[tooki]

I loved how train doors aligned with connecting trains and the Nachstahl/Procaine Arre (?)  at Bienne/Biel

”Nächster Halt [], prochaine arrête []”

At the airport stations and major stations like Zurich main station, they typically add English, too, nowadays.

[watchmaker]