Fitting Spacing on radiators

[bowrilla]

I'm in the midst on designing a distro plate for a case project and I stumbled upon the fact that there apparently is no standardized spacing of the fitting mounts on radiators. Many manufacturers don't even specific those (looking amongst others at you, EKWB, @EK Luc @EK_Derick). Or maybe some manufacturers just don't give a damn about standards - also possible.

 

Looking at Hardware Labs radiators, the spacing for the 140mm lines is specified with 74.7mm (GTX, GTR, GTS, SR2 MP) and for the 120mm lines 63.2mm (GTX, GTR, GTS) except for the SR2 MP which has 64.7mm (what happened here?!) spacing. Alphacool gives you technical drawings of some of their radiators but not for their v2 versions ( @Alphacool, maybe you want to add these to your shop?) . The 140mm versions come in 2 spacings: 69.5mm (NexXxoS UT60, NexXxoS XT45) and 70mm (NexXxoS Monsta, NexXxoS ST30). The 120mm versions again come in 2 spacings: 60mm (Monsta only) and 60.5mm (ST30, ST30 Industry HPC, ST45, ST60, UT60). XSPC's 120mm radiators again have 2 spacings (actually 4 if you include the side ports): 90mm (TX, EX, EX multiport top/bottom), 95mm (RX v2). Since they onlive offer one 140mm radiator there's just one spacing: 116mm (EX). Koolance has 2 120mm spacings, 69.6mm (HX720) and 58.6mm (HX720V, HX240XC) and 1 140mm spacing with 68.6mm (HXCU1402V).

 

No information from EKWB, no information from Aquacomputer.

 

So are people just making their distroplates specifically for one specific radiator? 

What about mass produced distroplates?

[W-L]

4 hours ago, bowrilla said:

-SNIP-

It depends on the distro plate, as most are being side mounted theses days such as this the ports on the plate don't really matter much as long as they are inline since the rads can be mounted in the same plane and the differences in distance between the two ports themselves are taken care of by the single 90 degree tubing bend. 

 

If it was something that was basement mounted for example the spacing between the ports would be more crucial. 

 

[bowrilla]

2 hours ago, W-L said:

It depends on the distro plate, as most are being side mounted theses days such as this the ports on the plate don't really matter much as long as they are inline since the rads can be mounted in the same plane and the differences in distance between the two ports themselves are taken care of by the single 90 degree tubing bend. 

 

If it was something that was basement mounted for example the spacing between the ports would be more crucial. 

Unfortunately, in my project the distro plate is mounted behind the front while the rads are orientated like they are in your picture. Crampend in a 19.xl enclosure with 2 GPUs.

 

I'm thinking about widening the water chanels in the distro plate so I only have to change the front plate witht he inlets. 

 

Not sure if this is ever going to be actually made. I'm checking prices for panel designs.

[W-L]

13 minutes ago, bowrilla said:

Unfortunately, in my project the distro plate is mounted behind the front while the rads are orientated like they are in your picture. Crampend in a 19.xl enclosure with 2 GPUs.

I'm thinking about widening the water chanels in the distro plate so I only have to change the front plate witht he inlets. 

Not sure if this is ever going to be actually made. I'm checking prices for panel designs.

If this is something completely custom making a specific plate to your rads would be best but if you want to have it on the market or just options to work with different rads you could have it so there is a modular port section.

 

That could allow you to make modular plates to apply over the port area with a variety of hole spacing to accommodate, also if the layout for those rad ports on the distro plate is far enough away using offset fittings or bending an offset could be a viable option. 

[bowrilla]

1 hour ago, W-L said:

If this is something completely custom making a specific plate to your rads would be best but if you want to have it on the market or just options to work with different rads you could have it so there is a modular port section.

 

That could allow you to make modular plates to apply over the port area with a variety of hole spacing to accommodate, also if the layout for those rad ports on the distro plate is far enough away using offset fittings or bending an offset could be a viable option. 

Yes, that's the plan now. I guess I have no choice, it's all so cramped. I'm still looking into wether small batch production makes sense even for prototyping. Not intending to spend 2k on some prototyping company fabricating the aluminium sheets. Probably more clever to use a maker space or even set up a cheap small CNC router made in China. But that's a different story.

 

I'm still baffled that custom water cooling is still pretty much wild west.

[W-L]

21 minutes ago, bowrilla said:

Yes, that's the plan now. I guess I have no choice, it's all so cramped. I'm still looking into wether small batch production makes sense even for prototyping. Not intending to spend 2k on some prototyping company fabricating the aluminium sheets. Probably more clever to use a maker space or even set up a cheap small CNC router made in China. But that's a different story.

 

I'm still baffled that custom water cooling is still pretty much wild west.

If you have a CNC router or mill the sky is the limit but in terms of prototyping I'd recommend to just start with a general hand drawn layout with cardboard from your models to get a feel of the layout and placement of ports before going directly into getting it made. A template of the layout with ports being laser cut from card stock or even sheet acrylic is good to start off from to then look at getting something machined.

 

Assuming that it's going to be made from acrylic at the end you will want to look for cast material not the extruded stuff and ideally not a glass hard acrylic. There are slight differences in different acrylics where the materials that exhibit a tougher property but not as hard will see lower possibility of cracking from screw stress. 

[bowrilla]

25 minutes ago, W-L said:

If you have a CNC router or mill the sky is the limit but in terms of prototyping I'd recommend to just start with a general hand drawn layout with cardboard from your models to get a feel of the layout and placement of ports before going directly into getting it made. A template of the layout with ports being laser cut from card stock or even sheet acrylic is good to start off from to then look at getting something machined.

 

Assuming that it's going to be made from acrylic at the end you will want to look for cast material not the extruded stuff and ideally not a glass hard acrylic. There are slight differences in different acrylics where the materials that exhibit a tougher property but not as hard will see lower possibility of cracking from screw stress. 

Thanks. The hand drawn version was done in Sketchup, doing some changes as I'm rebuilding it in Fusion - I need something to lower my blood pressure because of this god awful program.

[W-L]

6 minutes ago, bowrilla said:

Thanks. The hand drawn version was done in Sketchup, doing some changes as I'm rebuilding it in Fusion - I need something to lower my blood pressure because of this god awful program.

Fusion 360 is a good program it just takes time to get used to, I personally am fond of Solidworks so everything felt backwards to me when I first worked with it 

 

Post up some photos with what you come up with loved to see the design!

[bowrilla]

45 minutes ago, W-L said:

Fusion 360 is a good program it just takes time

Yes it does ... it takes its time to do stuff. Moving a few hundred lines around takes several seconds.