Scratch Build – In Progress El Calculadora grande (Big ass calculator) (18-12-2012)

The build (part III)

Warning: This post contains strong language and is rated pg-13.

When I was gluing the outer panels to the copper frame, I used a big chunk of metal to keep it from moving.


Nah, just kidding. I was lucky my neighbour found a piece laying around after I asked him to keep a lookout for a big chunk of copper. I told him I wanted to make my own cpu heatsink.
So now that I have this nice piece of copper I had to decide what to do with it, I thought it would be nice to make a small maze. Apologies for the mobile phone pictures.


First things first, making the round bar ends flat in a lathe.


Further refinement and drilling the center hole.


Cutting the first slot with a milling machine.


Cutting the second slot.


Since I made the slots so deep it took ages to mill all the copper, I also had to be very careful to not destroy the router bit because it was so eager to eat more than it could chew due to the softness of the copper. I wish I discovered this site earlier on because I would’ve discovered that it’s way faster to predrill the slot.

Result in the rough.


Drilling and tapping the holes for the lid and taking off a hair thin layer of copper, no wait, hair thik layer. Yeah.


Popping on the acrylic lid.




After milling the waterblock I discovered they had a new toy at school and guess who was allowed to test it out!


Waterjetting a nice circle from a piece of 1mm brass. (this thing can carve it’s way through a slab of 200mm solid aluminium!) This ring will be soldered on to the waterblock and will act as a ridge on which the bracket will be placed to press the block in place.


There’s something I forgot to tell you, or, well… felt too emberassed for to tell you.
I didn’t secure the router bit properly during the milling and it sort of got loose after a while.
I sort of noticed this until, after it sort of started poking through the bottom of the cpu block.
It sort of left a gaping hole in there. Sort of. Aarrhhgg!


Because there are no do-overs since this is my only piece of copper, I HAVE to fix this problem, or perform harakiri…

 

with such excellent equipment and only maze??? pin/slit design only!!! performance is a key!

 

The equipment may be excellent, my skills with the equipment are far from that. Also, the machines are not mine and therefore my time on them is very limited. That said I do agree with you and had I known certain things in advance I would have taken a somewhat different approach. With the things I learned from making this heatsink I would probably still go with the maze design, but I would create much thinner walls, make it a spiral towards the center and probably add pins in the core.
Meanwhile you would probably help me more by thinking of a solution for fixing the gaping hole in the bottom of my heatsink, then by complaining about it only being a maze.

 

well pix would be nice
first: i'd go with another piece of copper and make new WB
second: get sheet of copper (one can cut and flatten copper tube here) and solder up "new" base to the bottom of WB.
also there is WB designs from tubes

 

The build (part IV)

Good news, I’m still alive and well so I must not have performed the harakiri.
Thanks for the tips Vetalar, but I believe I opted for the better option since I was able to fix the problem quite nicely by drilling out the hole to a nice round shape and jamming a copper rivot in it. This saved me from buying copper sheet and/or round bar.
After this I smashed it in there with a big hammer on an anvil (yes they still exist!) and filed off the excess material.

This is the copper waterblock after I soldered on the brass ring.


Here’s the result after a lot of filing and sanding.


After even more sanding, wet sanding this time. You can hardly see where the router bit went through right?


And then I was like, let’s do the same thing to the acrylic lid.




Once assembled, I could continue making the complete waterloop.


No leaks found, for which I'm glad.
The loop goes as follows: The pump in the reservoir pumps the water at a staggering rate towards the cpu block.
Once the water finds it’s way through the maze and soaks up the heat from the processor it continues to the copper tube frame. Acting as a massive radiator, the copper pipes dissipate a lot of heat from the water that’s flowing through it.
After the water has completed the path through the frame it exits it so it can continue towards the gpu block.
Once it has soaked up the gpu's heat it passes through the car radiator to lose as much heat as possible before returning to the reservoir where it passes an inline temperature sensor. Here the water has a chance to chillout for a couple of seconds before the cycle repeats itself.

Testfitting all the components.


It’s alive!


Here you see one of the side panels of the case. The edges are insulated with foam tape to create a nice airtight seal which should also hold back any noise. The circles you see are small Neodymium magnets. Never mind the smudges on there, they’re not really there.


Hanging the panel in place for the first time. It’s hanging in there, but the foam creates too much distance for the magnets to get a good grip. As a consequence the panel drops too far down and creates a gap at the top. Still, I think it’s starting to look awesome and it’s coming together nicely.


Here’s the case from the rear, not too neat at the moment but I’ll fix that.


That’s all I can show you for now. Until next time, where I'll try to find a fitting solution for the manual power switch of the pump.

 

I think it looks great. I couldn't even make a simple maze so kudos to Originalrick for producing a beautiful piece with the skill and time he has Subbed and anxiously awaiting more progress! Looking great so far

 

Unplanned delays

Sorry for my absence, but I've ran in to some unexpected problems which caused me to rethink some of my design. This resulted into both necessary and aesthetic changes (on the inside). One of the problems includes an explosion from inside the psu (Which is why I couldn't access any files for this blog for several weeks). I'll post the whole story soon though.
Much still needs to be done, so there's plenty to come.

 

sorry to hear about your problems man. hope you get it all sorted soon