I've been working in building a Z-Boat off and on for a while now and recently got to the point where i needed to start wiring it up. Normally I use the really nice silicone super high strand wire for everything, 12 AWG for all the motors and 20 AWG for solenoids. However the 12 AWG is pretty big and heavy and I wanted to use something a little smaller, but as that wire is rather pricey I didnt feel like spending a lot of money to buy thinner (14 or 16 AWG) wire. Totally unrelated my roommate recently purchased a smallish lathe and he had to rewire it, it used 6/16 SJOOW wire, which as we found out is pretty nice wire. Its decent strand count (~30ish?) rubber insulated wire that is very flexiable. If you haven't figured out where this is going yet I ended up buying 10ft of 4/14 SJOOW for wiring up the Z-Boat, probably should have gone with 4/16 but I wasnt thinking at the time. Its kinda pricy for wire ~$1/foot (which is roughly the same as the nice silicone stuff) but once you cut off the exterior insulation and seperate the four conductors you end up getting four wires(some rather plesent colors too I might add) for the price of one and that only takes a few min. This wire is readily avaliable at Home Depot or Lowes on the big wire racks they have, its rather flexiable, not as good as the silicone stuff but better than most, its relatively cheap, it comes in atleast 10,12,14,16, and 18 AWG with 2-6? conductors per wire. So far it has been rather easy to work with. The stuff I bought has black, green, white, and "light red" (aka pink) conductors so its easy to color code the wiring in your boat, ie black and "light red" for drive motor, green and white for pump motor. Dont have any idea how well it holds up over time but I imagine it will do ok, the stuff we replaced in the lathe was pretty old and it was still in decent shape(we were replacing it so we could wire it up a lot cleaner than it had been done before and there wasnt enough of the old stuff to be able to position the master power box/switch where it needed to go, functionally the wire was fine) Just thought I'd share, use at your own discretion.
The wire you got is the wire all the PPB guys use. It's held up well in the 10+ years. "Cheap" and easy to work with.
