Cherry wood Case with water cooling

This is the first time I have ever kept a work log on one of my projects. I am building a wood case from cherry. I have a complete wood shop in my Garage.
I started this project in cad trying to layout and work out all the bugs with my design.


On the side I am going to use Plexiglas to lay in a rabbet cut.


From there the bottom will be the pump housing.

On the water cooling I made a 1:1 file to layout on the plywood bottom.
The actual plywood with the template looks like this.

From there I began to layout the water cooling rig.

I will continue to update this work log as I build this unit.

The cooling layout is pretty cool I think. Here is the cad file for the layout.

At this time I am not going to cool the video cards ... YET!
I might be a nut but here are all the componets in cad file that I drew out.

The fillport that I will be using will run up the side of the case and be hidden
by the 5.25 inch card cage.
The card cage (salvaged from a old case) will be inlaid to the front of the
case.

I hope everything goes as well as the drawings.

the rad seems to be mounted horizontally which is great, as heat rises but you dont have the hot air from rad going into the case do you? if the rads are at the base it's best to duct the warm air out or have the rads up top and duct inlet air.
you should definitely watercool everything, cpu, gpu & chipset. more radiator would be nice too.. - my 2 cents, ill shutup now

No the reason I started in the pump housing is that I needed to locate the holes for the fans that will be exhausting out the side.

And Ill always listen to good thoughts. Never shut up. When I taught in the Navy I always told my students no question is a stupid question. It could shed light on a thought that someone else is afraid to ask. Thank you

If you guys are ever inclined to create your own case and need good looking power and reset switches don't spend a fortune on them. Give your local hardware store a look and go to the door bell section. You can find some very attractive buttons for your case and its not going to cost you an arm and a leg. Trust me I'm still waiting for my replacement legs and arms.

Today I finished the top and bottom boards for the pump housing.

Now that I cut these boards I finished mounting the components and making sure the layout will work.

That's a Ultra 600 watt power supply that I will be using for cooling only. That includes the fans, water pump and the TEC chip to cool the water reservoir. I wanted to see if this would assist the cooling process and I needed 234 watts for powering the chip.
The secondary power supply will be remotely turned on by the primary power supply using a 12vdc relay that will close the power on signal and return the power good signal from the second power supply latching it on.

If you don't have any idea where these signals are, the Grey wire is power good and the green wire is power on.

I built the pump house with the water pump first to locate the radiator and how its going to mount to the side wall with the grills that came with the fans.

Man your gonna easily make mine look ugly. but I am glad that you started this thread. A lot of great info already.

I'm won't compete with you but I will aid you in anyway I can. We want to make these wood cases work. I pulled out all my cherry wood ( I got it from a guy who was practicing how to mill lumber.)

Tomorrow I will run them through the planner and get them to 3/4" stock. Then I will begin to size them and get them ready to join them. I need some of them to be 10" wide. I have a router bit that will join them with a locking joint. Then its time to run through the planer again for finish surfacing.

have a look at the how to connect psu's link in my sig, in my first post, it's a got a couple of different ways to connect them that can come in handy for wc setups.

that TEC will make alot of heat, you would want another wc setup just like your current one to keep the TEC cool. the other thing is water is great at absorbing heat, but no so good at absorbing cold. TEC's work best if they are used to cool CPU & GPU & the WC'ing cools the TEC's. they work so well you need to insulate from the condensation.

One suggestion I have for you is to get rid of as many 90 degree elbows as you can. The best thing is to not have any but no more than one or two or else your flow rate will suffer greatly and that will lead to your water moving slower so it is picking up heat for a longer period of time thus hurting your temps. Just get some nice tubing like tygon that can make those tight bends without kinking. Its expensive but masterkleer is a cheaper alternative.