Electrical lighting question

[macminn]

I'm hoping someone can answer this for me. I'm not the greatest with electrical stuff, so need some help. I have my led lights (one tupe and 2 1157's ready to go into my portable. I have the switches, connectors, etc. to hook them up. A couple questions came up: I orignally was going to use coiled phone cords as suggested elsewhere on this forum, cheap, and easy to wrap around poles, etc. I don't know if there's different quality of those, but the one I picked up at fleet farm is hard to work with, the copper wires are miniscule, have to be smaller than 22 gauge. I don't know how I can strip them, and there's no way to use a quick connect spade type thing for them.

Question 2, I just got done hooking up a home theater system and have a whole bunch of speaker wire laying around. It's 16 guage, heavy vinyl cover on it, can I use that?

Thanks much in advance,

Mac

[bigb56303]

i would go buy some car wiring you can get it at any auto store, you cna get red and black so its all color coded and you lessen the chance of wiring them wrong

[JohnMickish]

Copper wire is copper wire and it has no idea of what it is being used for. I can't say the same for the insulation on that copper wire. With the minimal current draw that you would have you would be ok with using the speaker wire, and being a 12V DC the chances of things going terribly wrong are pretty slim. Fuse it at the battery and things will be just fine.

Now if you want to use a coiled cord for your portable (very good idea) you have two options and a phone cord isn't one of them. Go to Fleet Farm and pick up a cigar lighter extention, it's coiled and around 16ga. You can also go to Northern Tool and pick up a coiled 120V extention cord that is pretty heavy duty and 12ga wire.

Hope that helps.