Bending the tubes
Now comes one of hardest tasks for the build; hard tube bending and getting the tubes to fit inside the chassis securely. I have never done hard tube bending before and the only times I have seen it done is watching Winston and YouTube videos…..
Armed with a hard tube bend kit, a ruler, a marker, and plenty of 16mm OD EK PETG hard tubing, it was time to dive in.
This was the first piece of tubing, running from the pump outlet to the CPU water block.
I’m actually quite chuffed with this. The tubing runs between the side of the graphics card and power supply, then detours over the top of the I/O ports then into the CPU water block.
The next piece of tubing was from the CPU water block to the bottom fitting of the radiator. I had to do about 5 attempts as the angle from the radiator fitting was very acute, and I had to make sure that it was secure enough to prevent any leaks.
So at this stage, the top view looks like this.
This piece of the tubing was the most difficult to do, not because of bending it, but because of getting the length exact and securing it into the fittings at the pump inlet and bottom of the reservoir, with next to no room for my fingers to get in.
The final piece of hard tubing was runs from the top fitting of the radiator to the top of the reservoir.
With the power suppler again put into position, this shows how little room is left inside the Elite 110.
That’s it for part 2 of the Project: Red Iron build log, stay tuned for part 3 which will include the wet test, coolant filling, cable tidying (or lack of), final aesthetics and system tests!
Project: Red Iron (Build Log -part 1)
