[beiju]

As part of a team who suffered greatly from someone's misunderstanding of "minimum", I want to clarify that it means "minimum diameter", not "minimum gauge number". Wire gauges are very unintuitive in that the number gets smaller as the size increases.

Last year, we were re-inspected on Friday because we had managed to get an overweight component within the limit. We had an inspector who thought that we had to have wires larger than the minimum in terms of gauge, and made us re-wire in the pit with 16 AWG wire on all our motors (I guess we didn't have any 20A circuits that year). Once we had finished that, missing a match or two in the process, another inspector came by to verify we had done it correctly. This one understood the sizing chart and told us (correctly this time) that all our wires were too small. We had to change it all back, missing another few matches. Needless to say, we didn't rank very high that year.

Morals of the story: sometimes, the inspector is wrong; and to be completely safe, use the size that will be legal no matter which way the rules are interpreted.