[Gooserider]

1. The Rotor design is intended to be made with a drill press and a dremel. It can be done with a hand held drill or a drill in a stand, but you will need a steady hand to do it. If you use a good drill, and plenty of coolant / lube you should be able to make it without breaking bits. The dremel with a cutting wheel is used to break the walls between the holes, creating the pillars. A milling machine will make the process easier, but is not required.

It is worth noting that if one uses a 1/8" mill bit to just cut the channels the way I did, you end up with square pillars. If you use the Rotor method of larger holes with thin channels connecting them, then you get the concave sided pillars which per Rotor are supposed to offer a theoretical cooling advantage.

Also, you should NOT attempt to use a drill press as a mill substitute, it is not designed to handle the stresses, and you run severe risk of damaging your tools and workpeice, and possibly yourself.

2. I made my blocks using a similar pillar design, however I rotated it 45* so that the flow entered the crossing channels from both directions. This makes the water flows collide at every intersection, causing major turbulence.

3. Soldering tubes is NOT going to give as good a heat flow as having pins that are part of the baseplate no matter how good the solder is! Furthermore, only those tubes that are directly in contact with the baseplate will see any real heat, coolant going through the higher layers won't see any heat at all to speak of. Basically it's a bad design.

Gooserider