Foreword

At Radix Wire Co., our resources are dedicated to one mission: meeting your need for quality high-temperature lead-wire products for applications at service temperatures as high as 450 C. We believe in designing and manufacturing well-engineered, uniform wire products and backing them with stringent quality control procedures, responsive customer service people, and conscientious follow-up efforts to meet your special product and information requirements.

Effective communications are an integral part of serving you better, particularly as you consider wire design and construction options that can yield significant savings. Therefore, we at Radix Wire offer this Selection Guide to designers of heat-generating electrical products in an effort to facilitate and simplify what frequently is a confusing task, selecting appropriate high-temperature wiring components.

To help you through the seemingly bewildering assortment of wire materials and construction details, we focused this Selection Guide on the key principles of wire engineering and construction. The basic elements of high-temperature insulated wire are described, and we have attempted to explain the reasoning behind each construction feature.

Four materials have established dominance in high-temperature insulated wire constructions, due to their integrity and reliability: silicone rubber, fluoropolymers, glass and mica.

The guide outlines how these materials can be used in a "highest necessary" strategy to simplify wire selection decisions. Using such a strategy, it may be possible to select a single standard wire that encompasses several applications. The advantages are: fewer costly production changes, fewer wire products stocked, benefits of volume purchasing and fewer opportunities for assembly line mismatches. At the very least, we hope that this Selection Guide can facilitate the dialogue that is so critical to specifying the best possible and most cost-effective wire product for your application.