But I am carrying on with my top / bottom cooler design. I have finished my first one, which like BR's design is intentended to do two drives at once. Unlike BR's block however, mine is on the ugly side.
I made it by getting a hunk of 1/8"(3mm) copper plate and cutting it to approx the size of a hard drive, and then milling the edges to make plates that are exactly the size of a 3.5" drive (about 4" x 6", (101 x 120mm)) I then got some copper tubing 1/4" ID, 3/8" OD and made as long a cooling loop with it as I could readily bend.
This turned out to be sort of a flattened round 'W' shape. The tube starts at the side of one end, goes to the other, u-turns comes back down the middle to the first end, does a second u-turn, back to the far end, does a third u-turn and comes back to the first end and exits out the other side of the same end. (So there are 4 passes of tubing running the length of the block)
Thus both the connection points are on the same end of the block, one on each side. Depending on how I mount the block the plumbing will hook up on either the same end as the electricals, or the opposite end. The loop is just a little smaller than the blocks, so it sits about 1/8" in from the block edges. I haven't actually measured how much tube goes into the loop, but it looks like around 2 to 2.5 feet.
I took two of the plates that I had made earlier, and sandwiched the loop in between them. Between squeezing the sandwich in my vice, and judicious application of a BMFH (Big _____ ______ Hammer
) I was able to get 90-95% contact between the plates and the tube. I took things apart, polished all the bits up with a bit of emery cloth, coated everything with plumbers solder flux and put the sandwich back together. I fired up my propane blow torch, and was able to solder all three parts together with plumbers lead free solder. It doesn't look great, but it is all copper on the inside, and today I tested it to 90 PSI with no problems. Next step will be to try doing some flow tests to see how much restriction I end up with.
The block I made was two sided, for two drives, but I could also use an aluminum block on one side (so the solder wouldn't stick to it) and make single sided plates to do individual drives. Or I could make a super cooling sandwich with any number of drives using double side plates between each drive, with a single plate on top and bottom. I also have considerable flexibility in mounting - I can stack the drives and plates in a 3.5" bay, use a stock sled to mount in a 5.25" bay, or do a sound proofing foam bundle that I could also stack almost anywhere.
I did have some difficulties. My first effort at making the loop with a tubing bender came out really lopsided, and I couldn't get it to squish down enough to fit on the block. So I went back to the drawing board and got a big block of wood which I laid the loop out on, then routed out to make a template that I could force the tube into as I bent it. This worked better, but the tube tended to kink and distort as I bent it, and this led to needing the hammer to flatten it when I was done. It is useable but not as nice as I would like.
What I would like to do is create some better jig fixturing so that I could bend the tubing more uniformly, and assemble the blocks better. But I can't really justify the cost of doing this just for the few blocks I'll be making for myself. Anyone have some ideas about how many of these I could sell if I were to make them for others? And how much I could get for them? This isn't a 'For Sale' message, as I know such are reserved for the FS/FT forums, but more an inquiry as to how much interest I would get if I was to put some of these blocks up for sale there.
Gooserider