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A Guide to Watercooling Fittings

2015-07-31
hey what's up guys Jase $0.02 here and today we're going to talk about a very important topic male pattern baldness oh wait actually actually that's a different video topic but anyway in the last three years and all the water-cooling stuff that I've done it's actually kind of surprising that I've never done a fittings guide why I found it fitting that we go ahead and do that today if you guys are like me you probably have a very cluttered email inbox like very very cluttered so I signed up for a service called unroll me which actually helps me take control over my inbox once again using their roll up and daily email digests I can see only the subscriptions that are important to me and kind of block out the others that I'm not really all that interested in fact I can even unsubscribe from all of those emails using a very easy to use single page which gives me control over my inbox once again taking security very serious they also use OAuth which will keep your credentials nice and secure and with their 45-day back scan from the moment you sign up you're guaranteed not to miss a single subscription so what you guys waiting for take control of your inbox once again head on over to unrolled op me and sign up now I mean seriously you have no idea what you're missing the aim of today's video is not so much to cover all the fittings that are out there but just the main ones there's no way I could cover every fitting type that's available just to kind of put things into perspective bits power which is one of the major fittings companies out there has over 740 SKUs by itself I'm not covering all that now the first thing you have to do before you can buy any fittings is you have to determine what type of tubing are you going to use now in the past soft tubing like this guy right here was really the most common thing people use it was very easy it was plentiful it was easy to mold and just move around wherever you needed it I mean it was very flexible so you didn't have to have perfect runs like you would with something rigid tubing which brings us to the next one which would be rigid tubing these are the two major tubing types you're going to find now some people might be thinking right now well what about copper tubing copper tubing still falls under the category of rigid tubing and we'll use the same fittings as this so for the sake of simplicity city let's just go ahead and refer to these as rigid tubing instead of PE TG and acrylic and copper believe it or not they copper actually comes in pretty much the same sizes as all of the plastics so it makes it very simple to just kind of convert whatever material you're using to rigid tubing now of all the different types of fittings that are out there a very small percentage of them actually have to do with connecting to the actual material itself now it comes to connecting to these you're going to have a few different types and you have to forgive me one of them I don't have in front of me because I haven't used them in years so I don't have one to show but that would just be a simple barbed fitting a barbed fitting is just that it's it's short for Barbara now I can kind of demonstrate what a barbed fitting is here by using one of the compressions and what that is is it's nothing more than just the little metal piece that kind of sticks out there and has a little well barb on it that will grab on to and actually hang on to the rubber itself but basically the material will just fit over the barb and then you have to put a clamp on it or a zip tie or something to keep it from popping off that would be a barb now moving up to the next step you have what's called a compression fitting and that's what I'm holding right here now you've got a bunch of different kind compression fittings you've got Chrome you've got copper matte black polished black black chrome I mean tons of different colors out there not to mention there's a ton of different brands so compression fittings between themselves are not much different all it means is that the actual tubing is going to fit over the barb just like I already showed you now if you take the compression end and you slide it over the other side instead of having to use a clamp the compression itself as you turn this knob will call it a knob the compression fitting itself over the tube it will start to clamp down on this tube and it won't let it pop off now that's all a compression fitting is now when it comes to soft tubing you pretty much only need to by compression fittings and the reason for that is you can bend the tubing to get it all to fit into place so the most cost-effective way of doing your your loop if you're on a strict budget is certainly going to be soft tubing and by going compression fittings now what sides meetings and what size tubing well that's going to depend on you what I'm actually holding here is 3/8 by 5/8 I believe and it's a pretty thick wall in fact that's what makes it so difficult to you know put this tubing on to the barb fitting is this very thick wall but I prefer thick wall tubing over thin wall because you can get very tight bends on it as you can see it won't kink the thinner of the wall the easier it is for the tubing to kink like it's doing right there and that will block all flow there's nothing more I need to tell you about making it fit other than make sure that the tubing size that you have and the to MA fitting size is the same so let's say you were running a 1/2 inch inner diameter that's what the ID stands for a half inch inner diameter by a 3/4 inch outer diameter you want to make sure that your compression fitting is 1/2 inch by 3/4 OD or 1/2 ID by 3/4 OD so as long as those two numbers match then the fitting and the tubing is going to match so you don't have to really over complicate it just over complicate over complicate I don't know now where things start to get a little bit more complicated is when you start using rigid tubing because there are different sized rigid tubing x' just like on the soft tubing you are going to have to make sure that your sizes match now there's really only three sizes when it comes to rigid tubing and they're always measured for the most part by outer diameter because that's the part that matters because the only type of fitting you're really going to use on these is a rigid compression fitting it's very similar to the way the barbed fitting works only it has bow rings are the compression fitting for the soft tubing it has a ring on the outside that clamps down and that's pretty much it so nothing is going into the actual rigid tubing itself it all has to do with the outer diameter now the three main sizes right now are half-inch outer diameter which is getting more popular because people want to fill up their big cases and use thick tube you have your 13 millimeter outer diameter and 12 millimeters outer diameter I believe it or not that one millimeter makes a huge difference in fact these two right here they would look identical but they're not in fact I cannot use a 13 millimeter outer diameter on a 12 millimeter and vice versa it simply won't work now I have here a few different compression fittings that you would find for rigid tubing compressions now for instance let's go ahead and demonstrate to you why 12 millimeter and a 13 millimeter are not interchangeable so I have here once again a this is an alpha cool compression fitting I have alpha cool I have primo chill I have bits power so there's there's a lot of brands out there now when you separate the compression here you are going to find that there are no rings and things inside these are what create your seal and if these are not in place your system is going to leak you don't want to do that now you take your tube this happens to be a 13 millimeter because this is a 13 millimeter fitting and you put on your compression first and this particular array or this particular fittings case it's got an o-ring and then it's got kind of a flat washer not all of them have that so make sure you use whatever materials come with your fittings slide the o-ring over it then slide the flat washer there's also an o-ring on the inside here that's going to seal against the tube so you slide that bad boy in there and then you can slide and tighten everything down and then once everything is tightened into place you get a seal and things are not going to leak on you so there we are a happy camper with a 13 millimeter rigid fitting in place nice and tight nothing's going to leak we're good to go now one millimeter doesn't sound like a lot but let's go and try and do the same thing with the 12 millimeter tube now the moment I put the compression fitting over the 12 millimeter you can already hear the difference it's got lots and lots of play in there the o-ring slide that into place the washer and then we will slide this now as you can already see the inner o ring on the 12 millimeter is not holding the tube but the o-ring on the 13 millimeter holds that tube nicely so if we were to try and put this together with the improper materials well that would be a bad day for your computer because it's going to get wet so I'm going to crank this bad boy down it is threaded all the way down as you can see it doesn't stay so it's important to make sure you just measure to outer diameter rigid tubing 12 millimeter or 13 millimeter now let's go and talk about the different fittings to get things looking nice in your system one of the most common things I'm asked especially with the skunkworks build log is how I passed the fittings through the floor of my case well I use this guy right here and these are called bulkhead fittings or pass-through fittings now basically all this is single piece of metal that has a lot of threads that's drilled all the way through and threaded with GQ 1/4 thread so that you can put fittings on either side of that and then it's got a threaded outside here with a collar so all you do is you drill a hole in the floor of whatever you want to pass through that matches the outer diameter of this slide that through put the locking collar on there and then this will be sitting in the floor or the wall or whatever and it's threaded so all you have to do then is take your fittings slide your fittings into place and then just like anything else you put your tubing on it and then you can pass through whatever it is you're trying to pass through so it's just called a bulkhead or a pass through fitting and you can use that to pass through anything the wall the back of your case the floor of your case the you know ceiling whatever you want to do now when it comes to rigid tubing you have two options when it comes to bending it you heat it and bend it like you've seen me doing all my build blogs or you can get these 90 degree bends you've got 45 degree bends like this guy here and then you've also got these well there are 90 Bend that has compression fittings already built into it so this is actually a more cost-effective way of doing the bends if you're not going to heat and Bend because the fittings are already built into the fitting and this is one of the things that bits power has been doing is adding a lot more custom fittings like this so that it doesn't get expensive we have two by two compressions for either side or one for either side and then have the 90 like this guy here see how this guy only has the threads this already has the compression built into it so then all you do is you take your tube and you know you put it through and then you can do your bends like this this is the way that all the bends were done on the parvum build and that's why the Parvin builds water cooling setup was stupidly expensive because I think there was something like 33 fittings in that in that build so that really is a quick way of adding cost to your system now the cool thing too about a lot of these 90s especially with these dual rotaries is the fact that they can rotate so I'm gonna put two of these chrome ones together here just to kind of actually they're nickel plated but just to kind of demonstrate that these can bend and rotate in two different positions so if you put together a series of these you can know you can come up with some pretty crazy stuff some people have even done entire systems where the entire loop is done in fittings and not tubing and that can get very very expensive but people have definitely done it now the last thing I want to talk about here is how I do the drain system because a lot of people have asked how I do the standalone drain system and the way I typically do that is I'll get a drain valve and all this is is a ball check valve that's all it is where in fact this one's stiff there we go when it's open like this water can flow through it when you close that T valve it closes a little ball in there has nylon seals and then water can't flow through it so what I do is I'll take something like this guy here which is a it's just a multi fitting valve here where it's got an inlet so that's where it'd be coming in from the pump or something like that and you've got all these different options here for outlets and what I'll typically do is I will just take something like this which is a double-ended male fitting slide it into slide screw it I'm going to screw this video and screw the hell out of this fitting and then attach my valve so let's say this end is coming out of the pump that end is going to you know maybe a piece of tube or maybe I even just put a little plug on there and use that specifically for my drain and then we can have you know the other side going off too you know ever the graphics card of the CPU etc etc so this guy is going off and doing his own thing and then we just plug up the other ones and then there we go now the way I actually do my drains is I'll have the plug or I'll have the valve just sitting here plugged off with the valve closed so that fluid can't go through it that way when I take off the plug nothing comes out and then when I'm ready to drain I'll take an extra piece of tube like this with a fitting on the end undo that plug screw this guy on and then I can have this going into a bottle or something like that and then when I open up this little valve then everything just flows out into the bottle or whatever that I want when I'm done I close off the valve and then I can just unscrew my my drain plug or my drain tube here put the cap back on and we're done so that's the way that I do my drains the hard part is finding the right place to put this in your system this needs to be at the lowest point of your system otherwise you're not going to get it to drain properly it's also helpful if you have a radiator with multiple fittings or reservoir that has multiple fittings on the top so that you can unplug a fitting at the top so air can come in to push down the fluid otherwise it takes a long time to drain so that's the way that I do my drain fittings so there we go guys that's it that's the way that I do fittings I don't really use anything more than what you see right here even though there's 700 something different types of fittings on the market but you know there's custom fittings for everything every need and no matter what you always would have the right fitting you just have to kind of think ahead plan ahead and determine okay take you can take a picture of your system and get down there with Photoshop or you know windows paint or whatever and just kind of draw lines where you think the tubes would go and everywhere there's a been determined am I going to bend the tube I might have to I have soft tubing or am I going to use a fitting like this and every time you do that you can then determine okay we need a 90 here we need a 90 here we need a 45 here and then you kind of get an idea of how many fittings that you need it's always a good idea to order a couple more than you think you need and have them as spares which may sound cost ineffective but the reality is that you are going to likely need more than you think you do it's good thing to have it just in case so I hope this has helped explain a little bit more when it comes to fittings this is by no means an in-depth all all fitting Skype but it are it is talking more about the things that I use how I use them and just some of the conceptual ideas that I do or I use when I build my systems so there we go guys JS to sense hope this has helped that's why I do these videos I want them to help strengthen that community especially the water-cooling community and that's pretty much it so thanks for watching guys we'll see you in the next
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