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color-coded wiring

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Tinker Unique

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Once in a while I see a telephone tech working on a telephone box along side a road. Almost always, I stop and ask for the scrap. ( pieces from a few inches to over a foot long ) Sometimes I can get a years supply of wire. There are 50+ pairs in the big cables... (blue/white & white/blue, etc.):)
 
I'm still working with a scrap spool of Cat3 I got like 10 years ago... Good advice.
 
I've got a box containing a rat's nest of telephone wire which I've been using for projects for, oh, about 20 years now or so. Can't even remember where I got it. Like you said, the stuff is everywhere. Just right for wiring components on perfboard (my preferred construction method).
 
Yes, it's good to scrounge scrap. I worked in large corporations for a number of decades and would often scrounge stuff from the garbage bins. I'm still utilizing large diameter (about 12 mm diameter) phone cables that have many small copper wires in them -- they work great with solderless breadboards. In the 80's I bought an XRF machine for the thin film facility I worked in and our techs installed the thing themselves and didn't use the large power cables that came with the machine. I nabbed those and had a wonderful cable for my 50 A welding outlet to run to my welder (the cable is about 15 m long). If I bought a chunk of such cable locally, it would probably be $5-$10 per foot...
 
I made artistic sculptures and jewelry out of those colorful telephone wire scraps when I was a kid but I don't like them for breadboarding since they're usually 24 AWG or smaller and they fit a little too loose in the sockets for my taste. Breadboards prefer 22 AWG jumpers.
 
Alternate / purchase item = computer/modem/printer cable
Good suggestion Tinker, I always keep an eye out for that stuff for free or dirt cheap.

KJ6EAD, noticed the same thing myself, it's just a little bit too thin for a good connection, perfect for perfboard though. They're actually a bit too large but my personal 'it's in there as good as it gets' for breadboards are DE9/DB25 pins.
 
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