thanks for your advice. i think i am indeed a nichrome guy. i ordered 10ft (2 or 3 bucks) along with my did clone. they only had nichrome in 38awg so its gonna be too high of an ohm unfortunately but maybe not. at least i can see if i am truly a nichrome guy, which i think i am.
Unfortunately, that 38 gauge runs around 3.5 ohms per inch, which is pretty high. There is a trick that I just tried tonight, in order to make my 36 gauge useful, that can help with that.
I twisted about 4" of it, folded in half to 2", by putting a toothpick
through the loop formed by the fold, and another toothpick on the other end with the ends of the wire wrapped around that toothpick. After twisting it pretty tightly, I ended up with about 1.75" that was so nicely twisted that it pretty much just looked like a thicker wire with a twisted texture to it. I made a nice 2 ohm coil with it, with one or two more loops than the 34 gauge would have gotten me, and it works quite nicely.
That halves the resistance of the wire, and makes it almost exactly the same resistance as wire 3 gauges larger would be, so my 36 gauge twisted pair acts like a 33 gauge single wire. You could twist your 38 gauge into the equivalent of 35 gauge that way. I'm not sure how well twisting 3 parallel strands would work, but that should work out to slightly higher resistance than 5 gauges larger (33 gauge.)
I guess I should keep an eye on the resistance as time goes on with this, as I think it's
remotely possible that it will increase as the wire oxidizes. I doubt it would change much, if at all, though.
