Wireless Set No. 52 Canadian - Project

[Chris Suslowicz]

Originally Posted by David Dunlop

Hello Chris.

I checked several references on hand for this particular wire and none provided any notes on the lay of the stranding.

The annoying part of all this is that I found the actual specifications on the Defence Standards website, years ago, and asked a wire manufacturing company how much it would cost to manufacture some (it was, of course, prohibitively expensive for a short run - I didn't need it by the mile).

If I saved a copy it's on a computer with a dead power supply (that's buried somewhere in the "I may want to resurrect this at some point" pile).

Shortly after I jokingly commented that "We ought to take a copy of the old battery specifications to reduce our load on their server" (but thankfully not before I had copied everything we were likely to be interested in) the Defence Standards website first deleted all the obsolete specifications, and later made the site private, requiring authorisation to look at anything.

It would be interesting to compare original British wartime 19-Set Horizontal Aerials to Canadian made ones.

I can do this. I've got one of the Canadian multi-section wire aerials (it came in one of the leather "Bags, Aerial Gear" and has been rewound on an American RL-29 cable winder instead of the usual Commonwealth drum, and I have a selection of the British wire aerials issued with various sets (the WS19 set of six aerials and the later 100-ft No.5) on wooden board winders, plus a couple of wire dipoles for the WS53. There's also the aforementioned 41-yard packets of Wire, Electric, R4 and a 100m (I think) cardboard reel with a NATO Stock Number - and it all appears to be the same specification ever over a fie decade timespan.

The tighter you wrap the stranding, the more copper wire gets consumed, so a finished 100 foot run of stranded wire will hold considerably more wire than that when done. Actually, the central core wire would be the only one to be 100 feet long. the other six wrapped around it would all be longer. If you needed to conserve copper during the war, loosening up the wrap in stranded wire would certainly help. One would have to be careful, however, as if the concentric wrap is loosened up too much, it will degrade quickly into a 'bunched' wrap, which can become a complete rats nest to work with in no time.

David

"Rats nest" just about describes my store of kit. I really need to make some space, sort everything out, and catalogue it.

Best regards,
Chris.