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HOME MADE WATERBLOCK

The water block is the first element you think on when you make a watercooling. It takes the heat generated by the processor away and passes it to the water. There are many ready meade waterblocks in computer shops but I think they are very expensive, so I decided to make my own modifying an aluminum cooler I found in an electronics shop.

This piece costs around 5 € and is 13 cm x 7 cm, so you have to cut it to adapt its size to the processor's. You also have to make some drills so that water circulates inside it and then cover it. Here's an scheme of the water flow.

The drills where done followin the inlet and outlet, then I covered with epoxy mixed with aluminum powder those where the water was supposed not flow by. In the following picture you can see a waterblock I made some time ago, it was covered with meth-acrylate. The one I made for the computer is covered with aluminum sheet because epoxi glues better aluminum-aluminum than aluminum-meth-acrylate

The waterblock before assembling it:

Next you can see the waterblock installed.

To fix it I used the same piece that comes with the fan (it was very tricky to decide how to fix the waterblock and found this solution the most convenient) I used a couple of aluminum U shaped pieces and 2 screws to press it. The screws gave me a problem: when I turned them as they were not flat in their ends they made the U shaped pieces move, so I had to put a drop of epoxy in their tips and then everythig ran smooth.

I also put an LM335 chip that measures the temperature so as to control the main fan speed and stop the system if it gets to hot.

Here you can see the inlet and outlet, they were quite tricky to make because they had to turn, epoxy was of great help:

I've found many webs where they explain how to make a home made waterblock, I found none so simple to make as this one and that needs so few tools (I only used a handsaw and a hand drill). It's bigger than those sold in the computer shops (but that's no problem) and it works very well. I haven't compared it to others, but the results I got seems to me correct.

home made waterblock