questions about hook-up wire jacket material and properties

I have had some pretty bad luck with standard hookup-wire. I find that 1. the jacket will often shrink back when soldering, and 2. that it can be very brittle (if, for instance, I use a bit of it to hook up some pots and jacks to a breadboard for a guitar pedal - the amount of fiddling that it takes to put the pedal together and trouble-shoot will cause wires to break off the breadboard) I have used mogami console cable http://www.mogamicable.com/Bulk/micr_cables/console_cables/console.html and it's been a treat to work with. The mogami site says that the jacket is made of XLPE (Cross-Linked Polyethylene). I couldn't find this jacket material at mouser, but I was able to find Belden cable with a jacket made out of Tetrafluoroethylene. Do you suppose it is similar? Does anyone have any favorite hook-cable manufactures? I know that hook-up cable has been discussed a bit and in a lot of cases it's probably 6 of one or a half-dozen other, but it would great to just have a brand of hookup wire I could rely on. Thanks and Best, Ben

if you need wire that has more "bend cycles", for lack of a better word, then increase the strand count.

105 strand in an 18 or 20 ga will frustrate you if you try to break it, 

but it is Expensive!  and the insulation is not really thick enough for h.v. tube work, ok for solid state,,

somewhere in between the 3 strand rat shack wire with the insulation made from candle wax, 

and the 105 strand, you will find the perfect wire for you. i like the ol HP wire, they used mil this, mil that,

so all there wire is top notch, maybe i can count a few strands here, the insulation is nice too, no creep.

i love this old cloth wire i get from antique electronic or andy's garage,

most cloth wire you get nowadays is limited to 18 ga, finally found some heavy cloth wire and it is nice,

good for heater runs and pwr supply wiring, where you want good wire,

the pwr. supply is responsible for 90% of all tube chassis failures, so wire it good.

teflon is so nice, and cool looking, but i refuse to deal with the stripping nightmare. BT-DT.

Ronald Reagan wire.    how's ol Dutch doing now days? chopping wood or riding the horse? 

and don't take this subject lightly, it can be the difference between pain and pleasure when DIY'ing.

wiring with a bunch of cool cloth colors, can i say that? is really sweet, if you have never used it.

it stays where you bend it, so you can make your chassis look pro-fesh-en-al, are you feelin me?

i hope not, that's granny's job.  ;D

just inside one old chassis you can get a lot of wire,

also shown is the heavy 14 or 16 ga cloth from ww1  ;D