This specification covers woven or welded galvanized steel wire fabric commercially known as hardware cloth. It is customarily used for window and screen door guards, tree guards, industrial machine guards, sand screens, and grain bins. It serves as a protective screen against rodents and is used for many other home, farm, and industrial purposes. The base metal of hardware cloth shall be of good commercial quality carbon steel wire. The zinc use in the galvanizing process shall be any grade of zinc. Hardware cloth shall be of wire woven or welded into squares or rectangles and then galvanized by the hot-dip process. The mesh size in inches shall be determined by counting the meshes for any interval of one continuous linear foot, in the direction of either the warp or filler wires, and finding the mesh size. All wire diameter designations in this specification for hardware cloth are finished sizes after galvanizing. Wire diameter for calculating purposes shall be the average measured diameters, after stripping, of at least five warp and an equal number of filler wires.