@Jay Ashworth This would have been in the fall of '91 / spring of '92. I chased a couple of wholesalers and asked the one who put the most time into selecting sockets and FAX'ing catalog sheets to also put time into choosing the most suitable wire. Our first application was stringing lamps festoon style on a production set in a used car lot. We had three real cars on stage, they were delivered one at a time on flat beds to our loading dock and pushed through our loading bay and onto the main-stage. Getting back to the wire. The most suitable wire of the era ended up being 10 gauge stranded intended for the application. Approved to swing in the wind 24/7/365; exposed to the direct sun, supporting ice loads, entertaining squirrels & birds, come what may. Whatever the recommended wire was, we had to purchase a 1,000 foot put-up to have the wholesaler special order it in on a non-returnable / non-refundable basis. The sockets and the wire were purchased more or less as a system. As we were running pairs of conductors festoon style and several festoons, we pulled four to six hundred feet off the spool for this initial application. This was twenty-five years ago and I'd be BS'ing you if I told you I recall further details as to the wire type. All I can tell you with certainty is the wire and sockets were purchased together to mutually satisfy the scenic designer, who wanted the "look", and electrical & fire inspectors / AHJ's if you prefer. At the time, we were the newly constructed venue in town, it was our first season, we were somewhat of a novelty to the inspectors as we were the first on their horizons to be producing shows from scratch. The major road house in town was predominantly doing 'four walls' rentals with travelling productions coming and going thus the inspectors had pretty much gotten used to that. Now this newly constructed venue materialized producing and performing their own productions. Thus it was raw materials in, some sets into off-site storage, others broken down into dumpsters and recycling. We had wood, painting and welding shops along with costume / sewing shops and were dealing with growing amounts of raw materials being stored on site. For the first couple of seasons we were sort of a novelty to the various AHJ's as they came to grips with overlaps in whose jurisdictions applied in various situations.You're not supposed to use insulation displacement connectors on stranded wire, are you? Unless they're specifically rated for that?
Bottom Line: I'm fairly confident in saying the sockets and their wiring met code.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard.