Shall I go acrylic?

[R.C.Anderson]

Basically, the tubing I was wanting to get (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=WC-107-PM&groupid=962&catid=1530&subcat=1775) has been out of stock for well over a month now, with no ETA known, and no competitors seem to have it in stock either

Should I just go acrylic & be done with it? How different will it actually be? I know I'll need new fittings, but they seem to be much the same prices as flexible tubing, and I could always sell my flexible tubing stuff on the MM to get some of the cost back. Other than that, is there much different? Anything else I need to consider? I transport my case around every could have months, could that potentially cause any issues, as there's no flex in the tubing if the case flexes at all?

I'll need to do some more planning for my loop as it'll obviously not be the same with fixed tubes, but that shouldn't take much more than an hour or 2 of planning.

Ideas?

 

[Five.Stars]

I think is pretty much an aesthetic thing. Acrylic looks excellent, but it also looks like a very time consuming process and measurements have to be pretty much spot on, whereas with flexable tubing you obviously have a little bit of give or take!

As far as the transportation issue goes, I can't see that causing any problems as I dont envisage you throw your case around like a sack of potatoes anyway.

I would have loved to have went with acrylic, but it really wasnt practical given I need to route tubing to an external radiator.

Good luck with the build either way.

 

[Avenged7Fold]

I posted a bit about acrylic yesterday in another thread. May be useful to you.

Acrylic tubing fascinated me when we started to get more brand choices last year, so i tested all the most popular Acrylic fittings to ease my fears of the tubing being not secure enough or particularly difficult to work with. Acrylic tubing does require its own fittings but now we have a fair choice of easy to use decent fittings of varying price tags.

I tried Primochills, Bitspower and EK HD fittings. Interestingly I found the cheapest ones from EK the easiest to use. These were 2.99 each and use two fat custom O-rings to tightly hold the hard tubing in and keep it water tight. Its design is similar to Bitspower ones in this way, and though may not have the same finish as the Bitspower ones, they do come in far far cheaper and need a fair bit more force to separate tubing from fitting. I found that the hard tubing was more difficult to remove from EK HD fittings than the rubber tubing on some compression's.

Primochill fittings sort of disappointed me. They look nice and came in a variety of colours which have a great finish but are a bit on the bulky side for my tastes. They are not true compression fittings, as they do not actually compress the tubing, instead it compresses an O-ring to the tubing from a screw on part of the fitting. They are a little easier to use, as they dont require a sanded edge of tubing but don't feel as secure and tbh i felt that i got more from the double custom o-ring EK HD fitting, which was also considerably cheaper.

If it is too expensive to make the full shift in fittings, you can do what i have done for some of my builds, buy acrylic hd fittings and tubing just to connect the blocks and components on display. Since acrylic is permanent solution to tubing which doesn't cloud, stain or ever need replacing, i felt that spending a bit of time and money on getting crystal clear, straight, block to block connections a worthwhile investment. My earliest use of acrylic tubing has been in a loop for over half a year and it is completely clear. Will also say that you can get away with a £15 heatgun and a £2 hacksaw and just use an edge of a table to do near perfect bends. You have a surprising amount of leeway with acrylic tubing when using rotary fittings as well, so it doesn't matter much if your tubing is slightly off angle or length (EK fittings seal the coolant several mm's from the end of the tubing, so perfect cuts are not needed either).

 

[iB CoMpL3XiTy]

Here's some of my thoughts on using acrylic tubing.

Pros:
1) It can really look excellent when done right, I think it's important to make sure the bends are clean with no burn marks.
2) It's actually quite cheap, works out to be about the same as using compressions + flexible tubing.
3) From a theoretical stand point in my opinion there's less chance of a leak occurring due to there being no flex, so no room for movement and as such the tubing can't come loose.

Cons:
1) More difficult to work with as it (in almost all cases) requires you to bend the tubing using a heat-gun or similar and achieve quite high accuracy with your angles, though I personally didn't find it too hard, just takes time.
2) More difficult to assemble / take apart the loop, much more planning involved.
3) Can't really use quick disconnects.
4) If you don't already have a heat gun and hacksaw (or similar) then you would need to factor in the cost of those to your budget.

Overall I'd say it's worth doing if you value aesthetics over practicality.

Here's my efforts:

Spoiler

 

[Bart_Hunt]

That's very nice.
I am going to instal Primochill tube next week. Black and red theme with a bit of white.
Even with the big case I have, there are some tight angles.
My idea to make it a bit easier is to cut a pice of tube, a bit to long. Then look where you need to bend it and cut the part that's to long away.
I have one spot like that and it will be a real challenge to attach the tube there.
But it's worth it