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:

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