Correct wire gauge to use.....
 

Hi.

Participated in my first ever race meeting Thursday just gone at DMS and was a hoot!

I'm new to all this and I wish to make some alterations to my cars electrics.

What wire gauge should I be using for.....

(a) ESC to brushless motor?

(b) ESC to lipo battery?

(c) lipo to lipo saddle pack?

Cheers.

Jim

Wire
 

I always wonder that... I used 10 awg motor to esc and 12 every where else
Nothing melted yet!
But I'm sure there are others on here that know heir stuff and can give a more educated answer :-)

Its a pretty good question. and of course it depends on your car/class/motor etc

you will have to try really hard to melt any wires, even 14awg will deal happily with the loads of 2wd 1/10th scale without any damage, so no worries there.

where it gets interesting is when you start to look at the voltage drop across the wires under hard acceleration (max current). all wires have a resistance, and the smaller diameter wire (bigger AWG gauge number). the bigger the resistance. which will cause a bigger voltage drop across the wires. so ultimately, smaller wires will effect your acceleration.

I didn't really worry too much about my wires until i did some LiPo discharge tests for work on a saddle pack. I was using some really heavy industrial cable up to the battery pack, then i used a 12awg jumper cable between the packs. I cant remember the exact number but the voltage drop across the jumper cable was so high, that the whole test was aborted due to a low voltage error on the test computer, basically the same as the low voltage protection on your esc.

So in summary, you can use 14awg, but i wouldn't, you can use 10awg, if you really want to maximise your acceleration, but 12awg works just fine :)

Wires
 

Lol ... see there's a great answer !

Wires
 

Thank you chaps.