Ok, well I figured I may as well get started on walking through Project Vortex. It's going to be a long slog because of the amount of time have to work on it, however if I get it in then I'll be inclined to finish it Project Vortex was born the day I discovered that with an Eheim pump and old CD spindle, you could make a persistent vortex which looked the mutts nuts. It then occured to me how awesome this would look inside a case. Here's a little prototype I knocked up. As you can see, the vortex effect is quite visually impressive. You need to have the water coming in at an angle to create the turbulence which will start the vortex off. One problem it suffered from was the fact that it would eventually work it's way into the pump and draw air into the impeller. As we all know, air in your watercooling rig is not good, so moving a piece of tube into the res meant that the vortex would stop at the tube and stay away from the pump. A natural progression from that is to move the pump further away so that the vortex is free to go all the way down to the bottom of the res. As we need to not only house the res somewhere, but we want it to be big and impressive in order to look good, I'm going to be using a Lian Li PC-71 for this project. which has enough space in there to house it all. That's the starters, More later on..
wow! Nice found! Let's just hope nothing will go wrong with those "ghetto"-like components Will you put some LED's inside the water? LED's! LED's! LED's! heheh .
Man, that looks really really cool! You should get some UV water dye or something. Nice job, puny human. [edit] OOO!! UV LEDS AND UV WATER DYE!!!!! GO ON!
This ones gonna go down in moding history if it works well... just happened to discover that? Jeeez man!
Well, ok.. I had the idea and then got the spindle, which happened to fit perfectly inside the pump. I was actually thinking of just making a vortex to have 'sat around' then figured it was a bit of a waste
4 words garden force water feature sorry could not resist its gonan look cool when its finished bling bling baby
Ok, part two. This is going to be a little disjointed as I'll just do bits as I get to them. What I want to do first is set it up working as best I can with the old Swiftech kit I have, then get a proper 1/2" system in. First things first. A quick trek to Thorite to pick up some brass barbs. I need three (at the mo), two for the Eheim and one for the res output. I will probably need a fourth when I decide how the return feed is going to come back to the res. One of the barbs is mounted in the base of the CD Spindle. There's some Teflon (PTFE) tape around it as I tried that first, however it didn't really work and a good squirt of Silicon sealant made sure it was watertight. Moving onto mounting. I decided that it's going to go in the drive bays. I'll worry about a CD-ROM later on, for now the most important thing is being able to see the vortex. I've made a perspex base to allow the res to stand free in the case. Perspex obviously so that I can do something with lighting We're going to need a hole in it, and a fan grille had the perfect size, so might as well use it That's all for now. Probably three more pics tonight.. then more modding.
Pretty decent Is it actually possible to make a vortex go a bit even thru tubes ? THAT would look definitely wicked
Right, with a hole drilled in the plate, I can now test the res in the PC-71. I'm going to do a dummy run of everything and get the system working perfectly before I start doing any fatal mods. No point cutting big holes and then realise you don't want something somewhere I need to mount some feet or something on the bottom of the res, so that it will sit comfortably on the plate, but for now, you'll see the idea. Obviously I can't get a CD-ROM in there, however that little gap below will more than happily house a baybus and LCD Right, back to work.
Hey ::Kna::, looking at those piccies, would there be enough room to stick in a Laptop CD drive? you could even wedge one down the side cos the spindle on the drive will hold the CD in place... Looking sweet man! You need to mount a "wall" of CC's behind the res and get Macro to knock you together a circuit to flash them in a row so it looks like the light is "rotating" with the water
i was gonna suggest a notebook combo drive too ... looking at my pc-71 and your pix ... there might just be room to squeeze one in ...
Looks promising, however I would move that plexi cylinder forward so it will have 1/3 of it outside the beezel. Then when you add some bright red and yellow LEDs underneath it you can also enjoy it from the side
Mashie thats a good idea. Instead of viewing it thought a window, you mean the cylinder is basically a curved window? That would be sweet
