Gadgetory

so this marks my fifth or sixth custom loop build and all of them is been with ptg tubing if you've you've asked for tutorial of sorts I think by this point I'm experienced enough to give you some pointers especially for first-timers because I did not have the smoothest first time experience bending ptg tubing I should also note that acrylic for the most part will behave similarly it's a bit easier in Summit this is a bit more difficult depending on what you're trying to do and some will swear by acrylic some will swear by ptg this right here is PE TG tubing but both are excellent choices for just bending and including in a custom loop like this so I'm going to show you how to do that in this video going to show you the tools that you'll need and some of the shortcuts and tricks that I do to make the bends look smooth like these in here you so the first thing you're going to need obviously is either PTV or acrylic tubing I don't recommend starting with glass or cop or something that's very difficult to to maneuver around and work with and Bend this stuff is pretty forgiving ptg is famous for reason it's popular among custom builders acrylic is also a good alternative is just a bit more fragile a bit easier to bend mind you that I personally prefer PT juice because it's more forgiving and you'll see that when we start heating this thing up and bending it the second thing you're going to need is some sort of silicon insert this has to be the same OD as the ID of your tubing obviously you want to fill up as much of that space inside as possible so that when you bend it the tube isn't collapse on itself when it's hot you're also going to need some hand soap this is my sister zone where it's not mine just something to lube up the outside of the insert so that it slides easily into the tubing and then you'll want some cutters I recommend use right here these are just copper cutters believe it or not but these work excellent of ptg if you know how to use them correctly which I'll show you in this video also I recommend at least 4 feet or something like this to kind of get you going so this will basically allow for a smooth cut all the way around the tubing you'll see how you just slide it in you clamp it down and you just rotate it a few times keep tightening it until the two by two cuts or you have a deep enough insert of where you can just cut the rest of it with this right here there's beautiful ways to do that I recommend using both in the beginning then you can just stick with this or the other tool vice versa I don't know why these are here yeah also an important piece to this puzzle the heat gun this is just a Waggoner heat gun you can pick up at Home Depot or Lowe's a bunch of first-timers and people even who have been doing this quite a while custom do builders use a heat gun like this I recommend keeping it on middle heat on low heat whatever you want to call it don't turn up full blast because you'll have to hold the things super far away unless you it bubble showing up on the tubing itself again ptg a bit more forgiving it's very easy to to form bubbles on acrylic but if you've been doing this a while you know you know roughly how far you should hold your source away from the tube you should be okay with either choice also the OD and ID of the tubing is important that will determine how far away you want to hold the tubing from the source of the heat also how long you need a hole over the source before you can actually start bending the tubes the thinner tubes the ones with the smaller diameters are easier to bend it won't require as much heat for a longer period of time to get those a bend the thicker tube 60 millimeters which I've worked with for the most part this is 12 millimeter here but a 16 millimeter OD is a bit trickier so I recommend starting with this with a smaller diameter for your first time let's go ahead and Bend our first tube or just into a simple 90 that's a good start for anybody looking to get into custom cooling we've already kind of like soaked up the outside of the silicon insert so it should just slide right in and if you want to help it as it's being inserted further and further into the tube you can add more soap to it just to make that you know a smoother process but you want to get the silicon insert much further past the turn point in the acrylic so or the ptg so if I want a 90 about right here then I want the silicon insert at least a few inches on either side of that point where I want to turn it just in case because if you don't have it insert for over enough and you start bending and the two partially melts over here where there is no insert then that tube might collapse on itself and that's not what you want that's not a smooth Bend all right so we've got the silicon inserted and I've got the heat gun ready to go so start off with low heat hold it about three to four inches away from the source it depends on the power of the heat gun the thickness of the tubing for this particular OD twelve millimeter and the power of this heat gun about three inches of ways is my comfort zone again if you're starting your first time hold a bit further away but I'm going to show you this is the entire process how long it takes for this to start melting so you can expect you know around the same time if you using similar tools and it's similar to Bing you also want to rotate the tubing so that all surfaces are at least somewhat heated after about twenty to thirty seconds I would say you'll start to see the tube Bend in a particular direction that's when you know you can start sending it very slowly and see it's already starting to bend we don't want to force it though if we force it they end up with really ugly turns and that's what I've noticed a lot of people will do when they get impatient they start to see it been like this and they're like oh good I can bend it a full 90 now but then it looks terrible because you'll get a kink here on the inside because it's not completely melted and the outside will stretch out at the point where they'd almost snap it's getting a little more flexible now you want to heat the underside the longer turn of the bend more than the inside of that turn because the outside needs to stretch a bit further you want to focus your heat primarily on the outside of that turn see we're already starting to get pretty close to a 90 degree no bubbles no kinks nothing like that just give it heat where it feels like it needs you if you feel resistance you give heat to that part of the tube kind of the point of this whole thing you can kind of work it and we pretty much that our 90 already at this point and go ahead and remove it from the heat I recommend holding it here making sure that you've turned it properly closing up to none you can use a tool to make sure that it's a perfect night I just eyeball it if it's too much or too little of a turn then I'll just reheat it and fix it okay so that looks pretty good for our first 90 degree Bend something else to note if you have soap or water whatever inside the tubing while you're heating it up don't worry about that warping your tubing much at all that's soap just going to want to move out of the ways it gets really hot it's just going to be forced elsewhere in the bend so it won't for the most part disturb any of your bends make anything look weird this is a pretty smooth Bend here I am satisfied with that now once it's solidified enough and cooled down you can go ahead and slide the insert back out and there you go it's easier to see the imperfections in the tubing when you have the silicon out because the light will Bend around certain increases and areas on the pipe where it's not smooth you'll see that a lot easier so at this point I can see there are a few tiny little imperfections here this parts a little flat there is a little Ridge here at the end of this turn there's also a ridge at the end of this turn very difficult to see but you still still notice it if you're a perfectionist like I am you'll want to fix that so I'm gonna show you how to fix that most people would say it's okay I mean it looks good from a distance if you get really close you can tell they're tiny little imperfections there so we're going to put soap back on silicone insert and we're going to slide it back in it's it's as long as you make sure that it's soaked up you know I got water on it whatever it's going to be fairly easy to push this back in through the turn so don't worry about you know after I turn it I can't put the silicone back in and we bend it it shouldn't be a problem now to get rid of the tiny creases that show up at the ends of your turns all you have to do is partially heat up the ends you don't have to twist anything you don't have to turn it might try to bend when you heat it back up I mean that's what it's going to do when it melts but if you give it just enough heat you'll allow that PEP heat it partially melts at least on the outside and that'll smooth out those edges give you a much smoother turn overall especially if it's just a tiny thing that you want to fix usually just heating it up partially will do the trick and will smooth out those ends give you a nice clean finish so this looks like a solid been here I would be comfortable putting this in a build like this no problem at all now what I want to show you is what happens if you heat it up too quickly or you hold it too close to the source also what happens if you try to bend it before the tubing is hot enough so that if this happens to you especially in your first couple tries you'll know exactly what to correct the second time around I've run into these problems pretty much from the get-go when I first started also certain tubing will be a bit more stubborn or a bit easier to bend I found that Thermaltake and alpha cool tubing are completely different in the way that they bend alpha cool tubing is pretty stubborn it requires a bunch of heat and if you hold it too close it'll just start bubbling out it's pretty tough to work with thermal takes tubing is very easy to work with I found and so is primo chill tubing at least in terms of like ttg I'm not sure about acrylic ptg stuff is good to work with I recommend most beginners start with ptg anyway so I'm going to simulate what happens if I hold this too close to the source we're going to try to form some bubbles on here so that you see what that looks like summits are on high heat don't recommend doing that so I'm going to do high heat and I'm gonna hold it pretty close pretty close to the source you see it's already starting to them there's a lot of heat coming out of it but you're thinking yourself oh yeah it's starting to bend that's great look at that we've already got a big bubble here that's not good that's a bunch of heat that's a bunch of just heated air trapped in the tube that's expanding right now because it's so hot so that is not good this whole run is toast now you have to redo the entire Bend and that's what happened with PE teach you get larger bubbles when it gets too hot if you have acrylic more than likely what will happen with that is you'll get tiny little bubbles that show up everywhere and that's just the nature of the way that it's chemically made not it just reacts differently to high heat so this is taupe see there there's no way I can get this back at all it's completely wasted go ahead and just trash it something else to note the silicon can get extremely hot but it likely won't melt you'd have to hold it directly over the flame to see that things start melting so don't worry about how hot it is getting inside the tubing it should be okay if it's a it's manufactured properly so the other thing I want to simulate is what happens if you bend this tube without it being hot enough so you've seen how hot it needs to be or how close it needs to be the high flame too to start bubbling up now we're going to try bending the tube if it's not hot enough you'll see the kinks and the imperfections in the turn so when you start seeing that you want to bend you're not supposed to just do that it would happen there so you have a big kink on the inside and the outside is pretty darn stretched so that will impede your flow it also looks terrible this is not hot enough and it's the heats not spread out enough on the tubing for a nice dent so for a good turn you want to have all sides like I said at least partially heated you want the outside the turn the most heated because it stretches the most the inside you don't have to worry too much about heating unless you feel it really being resistant to the turn but the signs are almost just as important as heating the outside of the turn if you don't heat the sides you will get that kind of like warping like stretching of the tubing on the sides of the term now what you just saw is actually only half the battle we have to cut tubing remember so we have a good 90 here this is the first one that we made but we want to cut it too to spec we want to cut it to length so that it fits and our other components and our other fittings well without you know extending too far out and warping the rest of our turns so I recommend using at least something like this this is thermaltake cutter here a lot of the custom cooling companies will sell something like this pretty much it also sells one I'll have all these tools by the way linked in the description if you want to do this yourself so a tool like this is very simple to use there's some rollers up top and you want to just rest the tubing inside the roller like that and then you want to turn this this is the the cutter part or things like a pizza cutter right so you want to just barely rest it against the ptg like so enough to where it's held in place now you want to rotate the tubing and what will happen is as you rotate it that cutter will create a circle like cut all the way around the PE TG that's good can you do this for krill ik as well because it doesn't really matter which type you're using and then as after you've gotten a solid cut in there and you want to tighten it a bit more so that cuts slightly deeper into that previous run now you could theoretically do this all the way until the pipe snaps the thing is though if you do that with the tool like this then you're gonna have the deeper the insides and likely the outsides because this cutter is going to warp the inner diameter of the tubing which could affect fluid flow could affect the just the readiness of the tubing to fit inside of fitting or something else in your loop so you can keep going again you keep going till it cuts like I said though I don't recommend doing that if you want a clean cut you want to have to use a tool like this which is a deeper still have it on hand you can use it to cut the inside down and the outside of tubing down go ahead and remove this now use your pipe cutter you want to align the cutter itself up as close as you can to the groove it should be deep enough the original cut with this should be deep enough in the tubing to where you can just rest this cutter gently inside that groove the lower you are the easier it will be to cut slowly slide through there we go now we'll get a close-up on this tube here if you've got a good clean cut you shouldn't have to do anything else to it now if you've gotten comfortable enough using both of these tools you can just ditch this all together if you want it just takes longer to use this and then this or just use this by itself you can just use the tube cutter you can kind of create a ring with the pipe and the cutter itself kind of like what you did with this you're just using the typesetter itself to do that you've got a solid enough string again start low on the cutter there you go and if you cut it well you should have clean cuts on either side one thing you don't want to do though is just put it superfast in our tubing it's okay sometimes to do that I wouldn't trust it though because what you might end up doing is like squeezing the tubing you might end up warping it and just kind of narrowing it on one side and making it wider on another that won't fit into any fitting that I know of it's compatible with twelve millimeter tubing so just be careful cut it slower it's better to cut it slower because you'll be more precise and you know exactly what you're doing to the tube so if you start bending it in a way that you don't want to bend it while it's being cut you know to just back off and maybe come at it from a different angle so that's my tutorial for how to bend and cut ptg tubing acrylic will behave similarly I keep saying that I'm not using it though in this tutorial because if you're watching this video if you have to watch it to figure out how to bend and cut tubing I recommend starting with PE TJ I think it's a good starting point it's very forgiving even if you bend it the wrong way you can usually reheat that Bend and then kind of adjust it as you see fit so it's forgiving and it's not going to frustrate you as much as acrylic model I think in the first couple tries especially if you're trying to figure out how far away from the heat source to hold the tubing with that if you have any questions or comments you'd like to make be sure to leave those in the comment section below if you liked this video be sure to give it a thumbs up thumbs down for the opposite click subscribe when you haven't writing stay tuned for part two of Walter White Three's build blog also I apologize for the semi ok-ish audio the microphones back here I don't have one up front yet I'm going to work on that I'll get one here soon this is science studio thanks for bending with us