Electrical – What do you call a cable that has string along with its conductors

cableswire

I'm trying to replace the cable that connects the magic wand in a VTech Magic Wand toy laptop. It's an interesting beast. Inside its outer insulator is a bunch of strands of string plus the two conductors. Each of the two conductors is a braided bundle of enameled wires around a string core.

It's clear to me that this was designed this way so that it wouldn't break under tension or repeated flexing as a kid uses the magic wand to point-to-select things on the toy's LCD screen.

But what do you call such a bundle? I'd like to replace it with something similar to the original cable, but I'm having trouble naming the product that I'm searching for.

Best Answer

You frequently see microscopic conductive "ribbons" (vs. round wires) wound around non-conductive fiber cores. That is commonly called "tinsel wire" and the technique is used to make super-flexible cables that will survive orders of magnitude more flexing than ordinary wire or cable. Very common in headphones, etc.

Tinsel wire is produced by wrapping several strands of thin metal foil around a flexible nylon or textile core. Because the foil is very thin, the bend radius imposed on the foil is much greater than the thickness of the foil, leading to a low probability of metal fatigue. Meanwhile, the core provides high tensile strength without impairing flexibility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinsel_wire

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