My homemade environmentally-friendly DIY amplifier enclosure.

[SpasticTeapot]

This is my most recent Art Metal project. I've also been working on my own LM3875 amplifier boards that should fit inside just fine, with plenty of room for a volume potentiometer. (the PSU would be outboard.)

The sides are Socket 370 heatsinks leftover from dead PC's, the lexan was a piece of scrap I found, and the copper bits were leftovers from someone else's project. The epoxy, however, was not recycled.

It's not done yet - I'm adding a small faceplate, polishing it, and adding a clear varnish to the colored-metal bits to bring out their color better.

(If you're wondering, I applied bits of flux to the shaped piece of metal, and heated it, while cooling it carefully. End result? Pretty oxidation. The texture was produced by good, old-fashioned hammering.)

The next one's going to be made out of wood instead of Lexan, and likely use larger heatsinks as well.

 

[Mohonri]

Cool. I've always wanted to do something similar (but on a larger scale) to cool an entire desktop-style case by running water cooling inside the case (transfer heat from the heatsinks on the CPU/GPU/NB/etc to the heatsinks on the side of the case).

 

[SpasticTeapot]

An excellent idea!

The best way to do this would be to extrude some very large heatsinks with internal channels running through them - in other words, heavily finned aluminum pipes with one flat side. Two rows along the side of a Shuttle computer case could cool a C2D with ease, and with no fans.

The whole point of this thing is to make it small - however, the amplifier should be able to put out 30 watts per channel with ease. (It's technically rated for 56 watts, but manufacturer's specsheets are never as accurate as one would like.) Seeing as how I'm not using more than 15 watts per channel, I should have no trouble with cooling - each heatsink need only dissipate a maximum of about ten watts, likely less.