Military MIL-W-16878 teflon wire

Military Surplus MIL-W-16878 wire. Acquired a few hundred pounds at a time over a ten year period during the 1980's. This is an accessory photo page. It tries to show the huge storage mess and how difficult it is to manage let alone properly catalog. You can view the cataloged inventory here.

Ugh! I had no idea I had so much wire. Where do you begin. There is no more space here. You have to climb over wire to just to get into the wire room and once there you are standing on at least two wire-reel layers. This is going to take some time.

Smegware wire collection. Smegware wire collection.

There is hookup wire of all gauges and colors including unusual and unique color combinations. There is COAX and TWINAX. There are twisted pairs, triplets and quads. Some shielded some not. Some jacketed some not. Basically no limit to combinations. There is even some custom, woven, ribbon with every kind of constituent.

Smegware wire collection. Smegware wire collection.

Cataloging all this wire made me really curious why there are so many unique color combinations when most of the cables I made or acquired were mostly mono color. Usually white but sometimes orange or red. Maybe the occasional black ground wire. It Made me wonder if they were chosen for their color-code numeric value... 479, 978, 428, 208, 905 etc... Most of them are not very attractive and some are even darn hard to see.

Ha! Ha! What a huge waste of time.

Smegware wire collection.

There is a small amount of magnet (enamel coated copper) wire. Anything from custom RF inductor winding wire to switching power supply transformer winding wire to resistor winding wire. There is 40ga. and there is 10ga. and a bunch in between. A few hundred pounds at least.

Smegware wire collection. Smegware wire collection.

And of course... The stuff no one should throw away. The scrap. The unwanted. The obsolete. We have it all. Quite frankly. In my private lab I mostly used scrap. Prototyping is always on the lookout for the one of. The last little piece. And there is a lot of it.

Smegware wire collection. Smegware wire collection.

Let's not forget. The larger cable. There's not much of it and some of it is used. However, it is all in good condition. There are several bins of this but not more then a few hundred pounds.

Smegware wire collection.

And finally. Not really wire but wiring related. There is a small amount of rolls of heat shrink and RF gasket. While we're off the topic there is an additional few hundred 3-ft. lengths of heat shrink tubing in many sizes.

17797