Have a friend who discussed custom made heater-cores with a factory who makes them here in Australia (Denso). Basically if the run size is less than around 10000 units then they're not really interested, and this is in a country with a relatively small car market.
With heater-cores it's typically a case of just piggy-backing onto a run of suitably sized cores. There may be smaller "boutique" manufacturers who are willing to entertain batch sizes starting at the 1000 mark, but you'd have to go out of your way to find them. In the USA I would imagine that it would be very hard to find a heater-core maker that considered anything less than a run of 10000 cores as being worth their while.
Let's face it, computer water cooling really does exist purely as a side-note to other far more profitable industries enabling it to be cost-justifiable. If the heater-cores, industrial/aquarium/auto mag-drive pumps, and the CNC machine centers didn't already exist to service other major industries, computer water-cooling would still be in the back yard with guys with drill-presses and dremels turning out stuff for their system.
Bill brings up another very good point though, and something which is gutting the computer water-cooling industry, and that is compounded by the small size of the industry. For there to be any major advances in terms of purpose built items, there needs to be considerable R&D and investment setup costs for such to happen.
Problem is that most of the players out there seem to be quite happy to hunt down and grab at whatever technology is developed by others to turn into their own (small) profit without actually paying for the R&D themselves. Thus, any stronger players are immediately dragged back down again by shouldering the bulk of the burden of development and establishment costs, without receiving adequate financial reward for such.
Truly, the commercial water-cooling industry is like a pack of skinny starving jackals fighting each other for the left-over scraps of the automobile industry, happy to gnaw voraciously on each other's legs if it means a few more morsels of food in their anorexic stomaches.
The only way out of this scenario is if the water-cooling market becomes mainstream enough such that there is enough for all the players to eat well (jackals included), but it is unlikely that many of the current players will retain any form of market dominance once the real big boys (Dell, IBM, HP, etc) step in and start dictating terms for how the mainstream water cooling market will play out.
In that scenario, it will have to be a case of "partner or perish", because once water-cooling goes truly main-stream as dictated by the big-boys, the bulk of the justification for the water-cooling market as it exists today evaporates.
|