Quick question about heater cartridge wiring.

Hello, I am almost done with M90 and I am trying to put the heater cartridge wires in the screw in terminals on the x carriage. However, the wire is 16 awg and it looks like the terminals are meant for ribbon cable size wire. I was going to peel back 3/4 the thickness of the wire but it looks messy and then it starts to touch the other heater wire. Is there a better way to do this? All the pictures I see online seem to be that the wire fits in the terminal perfectly.

Cartridge heaters used for reprap don't normally have 16 AWG wires. What power rating is it?

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

It's a cheap one I got from eBay, I am assuming that its 16 awg just because of the heat resistant wire.

According to the ebay page:

resistance of resistor 4.7Ω
resistor rated power 8W

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/15/2014 08:05AM by jakobnator.

Maybe off topic given that the following has nothing to do with the wire gauge but.....

If you connect 4.7R to a +12V supply, you will draw 2.55A of current and generate 30.6W of power.

Using a 6V supply, you draw 1.28A and generate 7.6W which is close to what the figures suggest. All I am saying is take care and make sure that you only operate the cartridge when fitted into the hot end heater block and that you have good thermal contact.

Alan