The Journey So Far
Hey, I’ve been a long time lurker of the community and I’m currently studying mechanical engineering. I’ve had a water cooled pc for the past 8 years but I’ve always been an ek customer until the recent drama that happened when I started buying from other brands and slowly replacing my old stuff. I’ve been building inside a Lian-li DK05 for the past 5 or so years and I’ve always enjoyed the abundant space to build in. The last pic is the last time I ever took a picture of a completed build (almost 4 years ago), I’ve since cut out a lot of the rgb and gone for simple routing when possible. I’m currently mid upgrade and I want to iron out a lot of the headaches I’ve had with my loop over the years, mainly getting rid of all the tubing that runs across the pc, it’s cool to have hardlines and visually stunning, but I just want simplicity nowadays. I have lines that come out the back of the case connected to a mora and a chiller.
So here’s the plan, I’ve spent the past month designing a waterblock that spans the entire rear of the case so I can have all my lines come from the rear onto the components, this would give me ample space to swap in a m.2 for example. This setup would accommodate either hardlines or soft tubing (I’m leaning toward soft tubing with quick disconnects). As you can see, I started off designing this in 5 parts, with the first image showing the part that hangs behind the left pc. I found this to be overly complicated so the next iteration had it in 3 parts, but finding a way to secure the channels between blocks was getting complicated again, so I ended up with a 2 part design, with the backplate securing both of the main parts. Continuing with the less rgb approach, I plan to have the backplate made from nickel plated copper, and acetal for the mid and top section. You might be wondering why the area over the CPU’s has 4 ports, well I decided since I have so much headroom with my liquid I should just go ahead and watercool my ram for the heck of it. So the routing goes out to ram, back in, then back out to cpu and back in. I gave myself plenty of ports for the pcie areas, with the right pc receiving parallel flow and the left pc having a standard serial flow. Learning how to make the pump channels was fun and annoying, I’m going to 3D print the current iteration to see if I got it right this time around, as the first iteration has friction with the rotor despite sitting flush with the block, as you can see in the segment I 3D printed to check the first time around.
I wanted to share how it’s been going so far and hopefully receive some input on what I could do better. Also does anyone know where I could either send this to be milled for a decent price or where I could get the material and try to figure it out myself? I think my college has a cnc machine but I’ve never operated one, I’d be up for figuring it out tho. Send cut send doesn’t work because the blocks are about 19” in length and the max on there is 12”. I was able to get quotes from xometry but the total is exceeding a thousand bucks, I’d like to stay under a thousand, but I don’t know if it’s possible. I think I’m gonna spend today lowering the number of screws