The bay might do better for acrylic, for copper the best I could manage was 4mm thick pieces of bullion for 8 quid a throw. 49 a meter of 1/4" copper is reasonable I think, especially since they'll give me whatever fraction of a meter I require.
Copper work hardens doesn't it. That makes things much more exciting. 0.7mm thick sounds good, it is indeed plumbing stuff. Ill hazard a guess that I can anneal it then bend it without specialised equipment, so turn a blowtorch on it, bend it while hot, reheat, throw it into something cold. Probably water. I'll look into that with some care, as I'm a materials science guy at heart. 85 a coil is too much for me when a blowtorch should do the same thing.
The engineers offered 10mm with 3 mm bore, which would bend beautifully but otherwise be little help. Its sold by mass, so no benefit to buying that and beating it out into 6mm plate.
The silver solder in question is only 4%, as its for electronics use. Wiki puts the composition of each at the 220 +/- 10 or so, which might be reachable in my oven. My oven is not very high quality however, blowtorch might be a better shout. As for mechanics of doing so, I plan on milling a 1/2mm deep grove around the block, putting a line of solder in this, then bolting it all together and cooking it up. Ill check dimensions, density change between solid and liquid solder etc. It may work out better to line the groove with solder, melt it to remove air, sand flat with 1200 then clamp together.
Tube horizontally between blocks with G1/4 fittings would be better. I think waterproofing it will be a nightmare though unless I solder the barbs in place. Even with this I can see the seal not being great, issue is that I'm using a stack of plates fixed together. So I can't solder then drill holes for tube, or the solder will melt. So Id have to clamp, drill down, separate then try to solder. I can just see it going wrong really easily. You're absolutely right in that it'll limit it to this board. Its an asus P5Q premium, so it would be difficult to do significantly better with P45. 48X is meaningless to me as I don't want multiple graphics cards. I look at it as when I move to i7, and repeat this effort, I'll do a better job of it. This is largely a learning exercise after all, otherwise I'd just buy the blocks.
Off to find a machining engineer. Cheers all
Copper work hardens doesn't it. That makes things much more exciting. 0.7mm thick sounds good, it is indeed plumbing stuff. Ill hazard a guess that I can anneal it then bend it without specialised equipment, so turn a blowtorch on it, bend it while hot, reheat, throw it into something cold. Probably water. I'll look into that with some care, as I'm a materials science guy at heart. 85 a coil is too much for me when a blowtorch should do the same thing.
The engineers offered 10mm with 3 mm bore, which would bend beautifully but otherwise be little help. Its sold by mass, so no benefit to buying that and beating it out into 6mm plate.
The silver solder in question is only 4%, as its for electronics use. Wiki puts the composition of each at the 220 +/- 10 or so, which might be reachable in my oven. My oven is not very high quality however, blowtorch might be a better shout. As for mechanics of doing so, I plan on milling a 1/2mm deep grove around the block, putting a line of solder in this, then bolting it all together and cooking it up. Ill check dimensions, density change between solid and liquid solder etc. It may work out better to line the groove with solder, melt it to remove air, sand flat with 1200 then clamp together.
Tube horizontally between blocks with G1/4 fittings would be better. I think waterproofing it will be a nightmare though unless I solder the barbs in place. Even with this I can see the seal not being great, issue is that I'm using a stack of plates fixed together. So I can't solder then drill holes for tube, or the solder will melt. So Id have to clamp, drill down, separate then try to solder. I can just see it going wrong really easily. You're absolutely right in that it'll limit it to this board. Its an asus P5Q premium, so it would be difficult to do significantly better with P45. 48X is meaningless to me as I don't want multiple graphics cards. I look at it as when I move to i7, and repeat this effort, I'll do a better job of it. This is largely a learning exercise after all, otherwise I'd just buy the blocks.
Off to find a machining engineer. Cheers all
The larger cnc is mostly used for production so I'm banned 
