Ribbon cable wires for extruder?

I've got 28 AWG ribbon cable, 26,20 & 10 way. Here's data spec:
Ribbon cable

The cable looks flimsy. I can see putting 10 wires together ok for the bed heater, but is 2 wires together for the extruder heater still looks flimsy. I'm thinking use 26 way cable with 5 wires per heater line.

Any thoughts, any one done anything like that?

If 10 wires are good for a 10A bed then 2 must be good for 2A. IIRC they are rated for something like 1.4A per wire. I expect there is some de-rating for wires together, but a ribbon must much better than a bundle in that respect. Also the insulation is rated for 105C so they can even run hot.

I haven't had any problems with 2 for the heater although the new design I am working on I have used a 15 way D type to allow the use of a IDC, so I increased to 3 for the heater. That will allow for heaters with 2 resistors which some people have moved to.

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Ok, got it, thanks.

Hi,

I've used 3 wires for both +12v and gnd, each of them AWG 28. I used 26-way ribbon cable, so I still have two free lines (one maybe for the cooler, and one extra). I heated the nozzle and the cables were not warm at all.
However if I did it again, I would use 4 wires. This is because Sanguinololu has 2 pins for both +12v and gnd, so I had to split one wire of 3. Now my connection to Sanguinololu has 1.5 wire to each pin. Using 4 wires will be easier to assemble - 2 wires per each pin

Here's how I dealt with it:
- from sanguinololu there are 4 pins, I connected 2 ribbon wires to each of them, so total 8 - very short ones, a few cm
- I've soldered together left 4 and right 4, so these are +12v and gnd respectively
- from the other side I've soldered together each 3 of them (these ones going to extruder heater)
- and now connected joined fours with joined threes :-)

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/28/2012 01:09AM by acc.