Scratch Build – In Progress ProtoHype - (paused)

how are you intending on the hdd waterblock fitting into the color scheme?
btw awesome job

 

Im thinking anodized black but it all depends on the price and supply of the anodizer. Since I have many parts I want to anodize, Im afraid the price will be high. If it turns out to be too expensive, I might have to settle for only anodizing the oustside of the case.
btw..Thanks

 

Looking good duder - excellent work

 

With one of the Hd-blocks almost done, its time to start the work on the next one. This one will be a little bit more of a challenge than the previous one since it will require a lid with a leakproof sealing. The plan is to seal it with a rubber gasket but I've been told that an O-ring seal is better. However using an o-ring on this block would require a total makeover of the block since ther isn't enough room (as you'll see in the pics later). I decided to give the rubber gasket a shot and see if it's possible. If its not.. well I'll have to redo it.

First of I cutt a slot with a 6mm endmill. This is to make things a little bit easier for the final 8mm mill. The slot was made in several steps to get to the desired depth of 10mm.


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Here I've milled the slot again with a 8mm end mill.


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When milling slots that is as wide as the cutter, one of the sides tend to get a nice finish, while the other side gets pretty rough. This is because of the milling direction. To get a nice finish on both sides, I milled it over once again while taking a very small cut about 0,05-0,1mm of the rough edge. This left the nice side untouched and smoothed out the rough side. If you look closely you can se the fine line between the rough and smooth surface right on the left of the mill.


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Drilling 2,5mm holes that for the M3 threads


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Again.. my little taping tool to keep the holes at a 90deg angle.


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All M3 threads done. Here you can se that there is almost no space left to fit an O-ring as I mentioned eralier. Lets just hope I can get it sealed enough with the rubber gasket. I'm afraid it might be a bit tricky...but hey. it's worth a shot.


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Here I'm drilling the internal channels for the whater to pass through.


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This shot you better enjoy because I was doing the drilling while taking a picture and it almost messed up the whole part. The drill managed to slip a little bit in the beginning and created some ugly marks by the top of the hole as you can se in the last photo of this post.. I was seriously thinking of redoing the whole part because of that, but I swallowed my pride and perfectionism and decided it will have to do.


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Drilling some mounting holes, similar to the ones on the previous block.


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And there you have it... the two blocks together. I still got the water in/out channels left to drill on both of them.


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Here you can see the drillslip mark I was talking about. Third hole from the top....Gaah it hurts to know that it's there.

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Well.. there wasn't much feedback on the last update. Don't know if this one is any better but anyway here it is.

To complete the internal channels of the HD-blocks, I needed a much longer drill than the normal drill sizes. I took a shot and purchased a low quality drill for around 10€ since I will only drill 2 holes with it. Greater quality drills of this size is atleast 50€ as far as I know and for 2 holes I thought that was a bit much.

However I wasn't expecting the drill to be almost worthless as it proved to bee. I would NEVER recomend this drill to anyone, and thats why I don't photoshop out the brand too show you what to keep away from. To begin with the drill was bent and I had to replace it. The second was straight but ...Oh boy was it blunt. The cutting was crap and couldn't even cut through alu with all my bodyweight on the Quill Feed. I had to force the drill into the alu with the Z feed of the mill. Don't know if that is bad for the mill but I asumed the drill would snap before the mill.

Behold the 12mm crap drill and some M14 taptools. (taptools where fine though)

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Anyway.. enough of the cursing of cheap brands and on to the work. Predrilling with a 6mm drill

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Drilling as much of the 12mm hole as possible with a high quality drill..

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..and continues with the 12mm crao drill to get the desired depth. That piece of masking tape on the drill is how deep it will bee.

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M14 tap.

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Finaly after some elbow grease I got the deep holes cut and threaded on both blocks.

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Time for the other inlet/outlet hole. Thankfully not as deep as the previous one. This hole is only around 20mm deep.

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Angled the block to mill a slot with a slight angle on the inside

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Kind of hard to picture the slot but hope you get the point.

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Thats it for now. Next update will be dedicated to the lid and rubber gasket.
Hope you like it.

/Gnu

 

Man, some nice work. Its always nice to see people use good quality tools to create some drool worthy mods.

 

That is some spiffy machining right there.
I wish the mill at school wasn't so screwed up. (Dumb Potheads)

 

love it

 

Thanks... me myself gets very easy addicted to other peoples mods when I see a mill or lathe in the pictures.

Thanks and sorry to hear about your school. I guess thats the case in most public workshops, since people just dosn't seem to care when it's not their own tools.

 

I had another look from the begining I like the solution you came up with for the rivets, another great tip for when I'm in a similar pickle .

These hdd water blocks are turning out sweet Gnu .

 

Thanks...it's sometimes the small solutions that solve the big problems

 

looks really good m8!

about the watercooling, i would by any means avoid copper with that amount of alu. No matter how many adhessives and anti corrosive stuff you put inthere it WILL end in tears. trust me, been there, done that but if you make your own waterblocks, thats gonna be zero problem

 

Thank you very much for the compliment and info. Since this is my first watercooling setup Im all new to this and thankfull for every advice. Been doing quite some reading though.

About the copper...I was thinking of using all Alu on the blocks but I came to think about something. How about the radiator? Its a Black Ice pro 360 and im pretty shure there is a copper core inside. So even if I fabricate all blocks out of alu, there will be some copper in the radiator. Anyone got any info on how well the black ice radiators withstand corrosion?

Since I will use two separate loops I'll guess the safest would be to make one loop with copper and the other one with alu.

 

I think the radiator has brass channels and copper fins in between them.
Or you could add lots of antifreeze/glycol to the loop. I'm not really sure how well that would work though.
Or... you could anodize the water blocks.

 

Your rad does indeed have a copper core and in the long term it doesn't matter how well it was made or (mostly; unless it's something like Fluorinert) what you fill the loop with; Al + Cu = galvanic disaster.

Your copper loop will be a breeze; the aluminium one less so. You can get aluminium-core radiators, but they're usually for cars and motorbikes, not for computers. Copper is more popular for things that aren't purpose-built computer rads but are used for computers (like air-conditioning units' radiators) too, mostly because people start with their copper blocks and then go looking for copper-core rads. All this adds up to few aluminium rads suitable for computers; if you're feeling hardcore something like a car heater core will do the trick. There might be aluminium computer rads on sale, but I've never used one.

Instead, I'd try coating the inside of the aluminium blocks - anodizing, maybe?

 

I'm not shure I would rely on the antifreeze/glycol thingy, but will for shure do some resarch about its potential.
Yeah I'm considering anodizing at the moment.

Thanks for the info. I kind of guessed that was the case. Will have to avoid this galvanic disaster then

Actually I hope the aluminium loop wont't be a problem since I'm intending to use a DIY Alu radiator/heatsink kind of thingy instead of a normal coppercore radiator. Since the diy radiator wont be as effective as a normal radiator, it will only cool the harddrives, RAM and eventually mosfet.

There might be some issues with the copper loop however. This is because I'm intending to use two external alu tanks in this loop and I guess the only way to keep it that way would probably be, as you sugessted, to anodize them. But I guess that's not a bad thing as it would only improve the looks.

Thx for the info Pure.

 

Anodize will eat out eventually in the waterloop. What if you had the blocks copper plated? Copper plate should hold well enough in the loop unless it gets scratched.

 

There's still a problem with pores in the plating.

Your best bet is to make the aluminum as massive as possible, avoid restrictive waterblocks, and clean/check the loop frequently. Large amounts of glycol will hurt your cooling ability.

 

The_Gnu .. Been following your posts with interest, I can tell you are enjoying your project.
In the case of using Aluminum and Copper and worrying about the Rad internals I just looked over HWLabs web site and couldnt actually make out whether the internals are indeed brass or copper or whether it was just the fins that are copper so i copied the email us link and hope they can answer your questions....
http://www.hwlabs.com/index.php?option=com_jforms&view=form&id=2

 

The res chambers are usually brass. I'm guessing the tubes are also brass.