One Saturday afternoon...

I decided to do a little upgrade on my rig. Just some small things, like swapping in a new bay res, adding a water temp probe to the loop, and replacing my old DD aluminum fill port with a new delrin one. Sounds pretty straight forward. Should take about an hour or so...right.

Here's my rig when I started...


So, getting ready to drain the loop and this is what I see...


A bunch of crap sitting in my drain line.

Please excuse the crappiness of some of the pics. My camera isn't very good. What your looking at is a bunch of little blue particles. Not sure what color they started out to be but they are now blue due to my Audi coolant that I use in my loop. Well no big deal. I'm going to drain it all anyways.

I go about flushing the system out a bit and tear it apart. I have my new res all prepped and ready to go with some dreaded 90's installed. And then I realize...

The res' aren't the same size. DOH!!! Didn't even cross my mind that they would be different sizes.


You can see why I wanted to change out the res. I've had the same one now for several builds. The build up of crap and the blue 90's had to go.

So this was my first real snag

The new res wasn't going to work with the 90's on there. So I had to switch back to the straight barbs it came with.

Which made me have to switch out one length of tubing...

Which showed me the difference in color between new and old tubing. The 'old' tubing is only a couple months old, but I couldn't live with the color difference. So, I decided just to switch out all the tubing.

I pull the tubing off of my Fuzion and see some blue crap in there...sigh

I know it's hard to see but the dark areas are more of the blue crap that was in my drain line and not corrosion.

At this point I realize that I'm going to have to flush the whole system. I'm fairly disgusted with how this has snowballed into a full blown rebuild at this point but it has to be done. So I tear everything down and flush and clean everything as best I can.

I put everything back together and start refilling. It looks really good. Nice sparkly new res and crystal clear water. Start the pump and my water immediately turns a cloudy blue color. CRAP!!!! didn't get all the old fluid out of the rad I guess. I ran water through it for a couple minutes till it ran clear but apparently there was some hiding in there somewhere. So, drain, rinse, repeat...4 times, before water was clear again. Grrrrr.


Much better.

So, finally, after all that, I got everything put back together










You just gotta love this hobby. It's never cut and dry. But what the hell else was I gonna do on a rainy Saturday afternoon.

LOL, that made for some good reading on a boring Sunday afternoon. Gotta love the hobby, water cooling is never easy and just cut and dry. Nice pictures.

Why, when I look at the front of your case, do I expect to see a little fish swimming in that window...

Pixel Eater said:

Why, when I look at the front of your case, do I expect to see a little fish swimming in that window...

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lol

Read part 3, http://snipershide.us/index3.htm

And all I was going to do was install a friggin PCI SATA card.......

what did you use as coolant?

joecop120 said:

what did you use as coolant?

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Obviously Blue Jello.

Arcygenical said:

Obviously Blue Jello.

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lol. hmmm, if i got a fillport and filled my loop with jello, whenever i get hungry i can just suck some jello up.
Anyways whatever coolant or additives you used I want to know so i can stay far away

DJS2 said:

lol. hmmm, if i got a fillport and filled my loop with jello, whenever i get hungry i can just suck some jello up.
Anyways whatever coolant or additives you used I want to know so i can stay far away

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Hmmm, all the way from fish to jello, not quite the responses I thought I'd get.

I used Audi/VW coolant, which I believe, is Pentosin based. I've been using this for years in a 5%-10% mixture. I think all the blue crap in my lines came from my res. All that buildup in there flaking off. I've had that res for almost 4 years so it did take a while to get to that stage. Also, the jug of coolant I'm using is a couple years old. Not sure if that has anything to do with it or not. Regardless, I won't be using the coolant anymore either. The DD aluminum fillport was the last non copper part in the loop. So there's no need for an anti corrosive in the mix anymore.