This is useful stuff. That hank is approximately 125' of wire.
The pictured wire is 0.045" diameter. I find it helpful to tag all my hanks of steel wire with their decimal fractional inch diameter figure, like so.
I can't be bothered with gauge numbers -- I find them quite unhelpful. Machinery's Handbook, Twenty-First Edition, concurs with me on that. Here's what Machinery's Handbook has to say about it (from p. 463):
I make an exception for electrical wire. In North America, the gauge for electrical wire is always and only American Wire Gauge (AWG). That gauge I'm familiar and conversant with, so I do use it. (Also, I have an excellent AWG table in the back of an Alpha Wire Company catalogue that clearly and fully documents the gauge.) But for other types of wire, and for sheet metal, there are just too many different gauge systems, and one is never explicitly told which system is being referred to when a gauge number is 'specified'. Hence, I agree completely with the above paragraph from Machinery's Handbook.
Anyway, I need to go hammer a nail into a joist, to improve the workshop's wire-hank-hanging-capacity a little.
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