Scratch Build – In Progress Metaversa 02: Ada

Have you not been following this man's work?!?
Oh, it's Redflames... Yeah, you were sarcastic.

 

Getting notifications about this thread is like your eccentric uncle visiting you once a year. You wish they would stay longer and keep sharing stories about their travels.

 

An update!

 

To be honest, a thread update here is the biggest surprise that 2020's given us

 

These last few weeks, I have been mostly bending brass tube.

This part of the project is what gave me the most worry. Brass is tricky. In model engineering forums across the globe, hardened metalworkers, smiths and engineers gather late at night in threads misty with cigarette smoke, their scarred and calloused hands clutching strong liquor, as they relate with hushed voices their trials and tribulations bending brass pipe.

For brass is the trickster god of metals; it does not behave like other metals do. It lures you in with its lovely shine, so easy to cut and mill, but it is a nightmare to forge, bend and shape. It gets harder when you heat it, not softer; tempering it makes it soft. Try to bend brass pipe and, unlike soft, compliant copper tubing, it kinks, and its walls collapse.

Many stories exist: how brass instrument makers freeze water in brass pipe before bending it, to prevent wall collapse. How engineers use sand or clay, or sometimes pour in molten lead (which is then melted out again after the bend). Some use steel bending springs. Some use special jigs. Some invoke the spirits. Some sacrifice a chicken to the metal gods. No method seems more reliable than the other.

So, having browsed a number of these forums, I sourced the most reliable --but still affordable-- pipe bender on the market: the Imperial 370-FH:



Which turned out to be a solid, quality piece of kit. But: will it bend?



Indeed it does. It bent the 12mm OD, 10mm ID brass tube effortlessly and with minimal wall folding:





On the upside, as I said brass cuts beautifully. As such a plumber's tube cutter with its carbide cutting wheel makes for nice, clean and precise cuts:



Especially when you rotate the tube at slow RPM in the lathe. Much neater than using a parting tool (of course you can only do this with straight tubing pieces). The lathe also allows for quick and easy chamfering of the edges of the tube, and polishing it with a grey (soft) scotchbrite pad to get the right brushed finish.

So where are we going with this? Well, combined with Bitspower TruBrass components, we get the following:









The important thing to remember when designing the water cooling loop is:

1. Make it as simple as possible;
2. The order of the components does not matter, as long as the reservoir is the last part of the loop.

Hence as you can see, the loop will go from pump --> GPU --> memory --> CPU --> radiator --> reservoir --> pump.

More to follow...

 

It lives!

...and so does @Nexxo

 

AN UPDATEEEEEEEEE!!! Thank you!

This phrasing means at some point you sacrificed a chicken?

*Installs a 45 degree bend between two rotarys.
Don't feel bad. I've been skipping this step in pretty extreme ways too.

 

It doesn't count if you eat it afterwards.

Aesthetically it would have looked wrong. The outlet elbow on the main block exits straight upwards so the inlet elbow had to point straight down, which meant that there had to be a 45 degree bend in the tube to compensate for the offset elbow from the memory block...



Basically PC modding is just building computers in a needlessly complicated way...

 

The only issue is, isn't the actual hardware years "out of date" at this stage?

 

Honestly in my opinion the only "problem" for Nexxo would be the loop and water blocks.

If you make it with standard fixing point, you can swap the hardware with new one.

It's like when you buy a case, you just make sure it has the inside volume to use the hardware you need for the build, but it will probably be bigger than you really need.

 

It should be good for at least 2 Windows 10 updates still. Just keep a USB installer stick handy to remind it to stay in line. -Or hang it over the ports by a single hair of a horses tail.
What am I saying? All rigs are only good up to the third 10 update.

@Nexxo - I gotta tease ya!

 

Naah. CPUs haven't come on that much over the last years. It's the GPU that matters most, and I've got room for something like an nVidia RTX 3070 card.

Indeed. Ada is designed for some upgrade flexibility. Although I may simply design a whole new PC from scratch.

I always keep a set of screwdrivers near my PC. That seems enough to make it behave.

 

Just a friendly reminder you have a project log.

 

"Did he ever finish Metaversa?" (My last gasp to my grand children)

;-)

 

Even I'm giving Nexxo some grief here!

 

He'll never notice if we don't @Nexxo him.

 

I only just officially retired 4 days ago! Gimme a break...



And, you know, working in the NHS means long tiring hours at the best of times, and the last 2 years have been the absolute worst of times. I hope to have more time to dedicate to modding projects now, including Ada.

 

It's been fine. just a blip. Not affected me at all...