[Cova]

Just looking for some ideas for my next project. Except that it will somehow incorporate the phase-change cooler pictured below, I've really not decided at all what to do. I'll most likely just end up building a system on top of it within a clear extension to the existing box. Also, whatever I do I don't want to mod the phase-change system itself at all - I don't even want to learn about recharging the system and all that stuff right now.

The cooler is an old Pepsi fountain-machine, designed to have a 4 pipes (one for each flavor, hence the 4 holes in the front) with warm soda running down into the tub, then back out the other side to the 4 holes, where there would be a tap to dispense the now-chilled liquid. The unit has a ice-sensor of some type built into the tub such that about an inch of ice forms on the evaporator and then the compressor turns off - this ice-bank keeps the remaining water at 0C (it would freeze solid without the mixer which you can see in the pics) and when the ice shrinks back down the compressor turns back on again.

My current idea to chill the coolant for the CPU is to build another copper spiral about 1" less in diameter than the evaporator, placed inside the tub, and run my cooling system through that instead of a rad. I would do this instead of just using the tub-water directly so that I can run different mixtures of coolant in each part (tapwater in the tub, thats what the system was designed to run with, and a different mixture in the CPU-cooler that wouldn't freeze till -20C or so, some type of water/antifreeze or water/alcohol mix) I'd like to try and get it so that my inner copper spiral would be about 1/2 buried in the ice-block.

Anyways - here come the pics.