# I’ve got the AWG wire thickness blues

I’m thinking about making a vibration charger for my phone and so I need magnet wire, i.e. thin copper wire to wrap around a magnet. So I discovered, to my disgust, that AWG is the unit of wire thickness. For some reasons, the powers that be decided that it would be smarter to use a logarithmic function of diameter to measure wire thickness, instead of just, hmmm, using the fucking wire diameter to measure the wire thickness!

I decided to make a table of conversions for those of us that still strive for sanity. In terms of the AWG number, you can get the wire thicknessm, in millimeters, using this formula:

$Diameter=0.127mm \ \times 92^{\frac{36-n}{39}}$

I know someone is goint to respond to this post and say something like “they use that equation to make it a logarithmic scale”. The only reason you use a logarithmic scale is because the range of values are so vast that it becomes annoying to write out all of the digits. I question whether the range of values of wire thickness is vast enough to warrants the use of a logarithmic scale.

 AWG Millimeters Inches Light years -10 26.307 1.2331 0.00000000000000000278 -9 23.427 1.0981 0.00000000000000000248 -8 20.862 0.9779 0.00000000000000000221 -7 18.578 0.8709 0.00000000000000000197 -6 16.544 0.7755 0.00000000000000000175 -5 14.733 0.6906 0.00000000000000000156 -4 13.120 0.6150 0.00000000000000000139 -3 11.684 0.5477 0.00000000000000000124 -2 10.405 0.4877 0.00000000000000000110 -1 9.266 0.4343 0.00000000000000000098 0 8.251 0.3868 0.00000000000000000087 1 7.348 0.3444 0.00000000000000000078 2 6.544 0.3067 0.00000000000000000069 3 5.827 0.2732 0.00000000000000000062 4 5.189 0.2433 0.00000000000000000055 5 4.621 0.2166 0.00000000000000000049 6 4.115 0.1929 0.00000000000000000044 7 3.665 0.1718 0.00000000000000000039 8 3.264 0.1530 0.00000000000000000035 9 2.906 0.1362 0.00000000000000000031 10 2.588 0.1213 0.00000000000000000027 11 2.305 0.1080 0.00000000000000000024 12 2.053 0.0962 0.00000000000000000022 13 1.828 0.0857 0.00000000000000000019 14 1.628 0.0763 0.00000000000000000017 15 1.450 0.0679 0.00000000000000000015 16 1.291 0.0605 0.00000000000000000014 17 1.150 0.0539 0.00000000000000000012 18 1.024 0.0480 0.00000000000000000011 19 0.912 0.0427 0.00000000000000000010 20 0.812 0.0381 0.00000000000000000009 21 0.723 0.0339 0.00000000000000000008 22 0.644 0.0302 0.00000000000000000007 23 0.573 0.0269 0.00000000000000000006 24 0.511 0.0239 0.00000000000000000005 25 0.455 0.0213 0.00000000000000000005 26 0.405 0.0190 0.00000000000000000004 27 0.361 0.0169 0.00000000000000000004 28 0.321 0.0151 0.00000000000000000003 29 0.286 0.0134 0.00000000000000000003 30 0.255 0.0119 0.00000000000000000003 31 0.227 0.0106 0.00000000000000000002 32 0.202 0.0095 0.00000000000000000002 33 0.180 0.0084 0.00000000000000000002 34 0.160 0.0075 0.00000000000000000002 35 0.143 0.0067 0.00000000000000000002 36 0.127 0.0060 0.00000000000000000001 37 0.113 0.0053 0.00000000000000000001 38 0.101 0.0047 0.00000000000000000001 39 0.090 0.0042 0.00000000000000000001 40 0.080 0.0037 0.00000000000000000001