 This right here is a red 8K DSMC2 WCE and that's for water-cooled edition. That's right my friends, we water-cooled an 8K red camera. This solution, believe it or not, was entirely engineered in-house and delivers on two things from our original teardown of this camera. One, we did manage to water-cool a red cinema camera. And two, it did end up being quite a lengthy project. It ended up taking us, yes, exactly one year to the day. In that time, we acquired a new warehouse unit, filled it with equipment that we needed in order to complete this project, learned how to use that equipment, and spent a lot of time asking ourselves, why the hell did we promise you guys we were gonna do this? But it all comes to an end now. Stay tuned guys because we're gonna show you exactly how it works. By the way, it's recording right now. You can see right there. Even though we've been recording for a long time, we are locked at 35 degrees Celsius. Friggin awesome! Thermal Grizzly's Conductonaut Liquid Metal Thermal Interface Material offers maximum cooling performance. Check it out and keep things cool at the link in the video description. So this right here is the easier of the several heat sinks that we have to do. For this one right here, the plan is basically to just chop off the fins and screw a water block on right there. The biggest problem that we're going to have with like any of these is just that our water block and fittings and everything has to be contained within the size of these fins. Or it doesn't fit in the camera. For those wondering why we don't just refabricate this part, if you look at the bottom and all these cutouts, I mean, Red hasn't provided us any schematics, we'd be just measuring this would be a nightmare. We're doing our best. Yeah, and if you get one of these heights a bit wrong and tighten it up, tighten it down, there's a good chance that you could just crack a chip. But that's not even the hard one. That's the easy one. This right here is the really difficult one that we have to do first. The plan is to chop all of these fins off and then create a super small water block that just fits on here. And then the fittings come out the back. And that's what we have modeled right here, which looks pretty simple. We have to consider that all of that is within about this big. So we chop all the fins off, but we leave the pipes. Pipes are still there. Yeah. And that block slides onto the pipes? Yep, through these holes that are right here and right here. So we are effectively water cooling the heat pipes. Yes. Okay, this makes perfect sense to me in that context. The first thing we need to do is try to remove the fins from this heat pipe without screwing up the heat pipe itself. Getting this off cleanly is mission critical, so I'm not going to screw around with trying to do it fast. I'm just going to file it off and it's going to take a while. Actually, maybe snips aren't the worst idea. Kind of come in here. All right, so a material like copper, which is what these heat pipes are made out of, they do this thing that's called work hardening. Like bend it a little bit and then bend it a little bit and then bend it a little bit. It slowly becomes harder and also more brittle. This right here is a perfect example of that. It just snapped right there. It means my job just got a whole lot harder. We're going to have to order some heat pipes now from Digi-Key. We're going to have to make a custom jig on the router to create the bend that we need. It's just going to be a bad time. It's going to be a lot of work that I did not want to do, but now I need to. While Alex tries to figure that out, let's go through the tools that you're going to need to water cool your 8K RED camera, which is I'm sure why you guys are watching this video. First and foremost, you're going to want a CNC router or mill. So this is from Avid CNC. It's their Pro 4848, and you could probably get the job done with just this and a drill press. But if you wanted to make your life a little bit easier, a manual mill like this one here and a lathe are going to go a long way. By the way, guys, I do want to give a shout out to O'Canada Tool Supply for all the drills, taps, indicators, storage, and PPE that we're using in this project here. We're going to have a list of all of it down below. So thanks, guys. Just as important as the physical tools is a software, and for this we'll be using SolidWorks and HSMworks. This first heatsink cools the logic of the camera, a couple FPGAs, memory, that sort of stuff. We've used similar designs to this to cool desktop CPUs, so I'm not too concerned about his performance. For the sensor, though, we need to create this really weird heatsink attached to heat pipes. This is where we needed to verify that it will all work well in SolidWorks flow simulation before proceeding to machining. First of all, the design is pretty wacky, so I want to double check that the water will flow reasonably well through the heatsink. It's only a bit vortexy, so I'll take it. But more importantly, we need to check that it won't cool the sensor too much, since temperature variance can ever so slightly change the image. Fortunately, though, the cooling looks great, and with the pump speed controlled by the camera, we should have rock solid temps. So after destroying this heat pipe, we need to rethink it a tiny bit, but I don't think it's a huge deal. We're just going to try and use some heat to get this off of here. Then we'll need to make some heat pipes, bend them around, and make the water block to go on top. Right now, I just want to start off by making the water block. It should work fine, but we are kind of pushing the limits of how deep this tool can go, so we might have to redo it if we break it. But yeah, hopefully that doesn't happen. Should be fine. This test will help us find out if we can successfully machine the grooves for the heat sink. The tool has to go fairly deep into the material, and if the chips get stuck down there, we have the potential problem of blowing up an end mill. Fortunately, the router had no issues with the tool blowing up. As for this heat sink, all that's going to be left over once we're done with it is this little sensor thing and the little piece of copper or aluminum that's down here that actually interfaces with the sensor. So I'm just going to give it some heat and hopefully this right here comes off pretty easily. Perfect. The Terapec didn't like it too much, but we did get it off successfully. So since the heat pipes do not need to survive this operation, we can be a bit less nice to them. This is just horrendous. Oh, come on. Well, it was nice knowing you. Now we're going to work on replacing this heat sink right here with a water cooler. This one's a lot simpler than the other one, so it's just kind of lop off the fins, stick a normal water cooler on top. The only real problem is that it needs to be pretty small. So like these are the fittings that we have. As you can see, it needs to go right down in here. We might need to cut off like the bottom and some of the top to get everything to fit in. We might have some kinking on the top. We'll just need to put it together to find out. So. On our first part here, as you can see, like where we wanted this to be isn't quite centered on the stock. So the problem is that the router here, although, you know, it looks pretty smart, it's actually pretty dumb. We need to be able to tell it really accurately. So if we're going to be using a new router, we're going to have to cut it down to this. And pretty dumb, we need to be able to tell it really accurately where both of the edges of our material is. So how you would normally do that is using an edge finder like this one. It spins around, there's an eccentric spring, and when you get close to your work, it does a little like a little scoot out, which would be fine. But our router spins at a minimum of 7,800 RPM, and this thing just immediately blew up. So then we got this guy right here. It's a bit fancier, and when it touches the edge of the work, there are lights around here that light up, which would be great. But if you look here, so that got us thinking, is it possible to just move the whole spindle right here up? And it turns out if you look at just how far it is compared to the table, it's pretty safe to move it up. So we're going to do that now. So this heat pipe looks pretty good. Although I am slightly concerned that flattening it and bending it might have damaged the internal wick. So I want to validate that it is still totally fine to transfer heat from one way to the other. The original plan was to use the nice FLIR camera to, you know, look at it. The only problem is that this is reflective, so this cannot see how hot this is in IR. So we need to do this a dumb way then. My hand is now hot, so she works. With the two water blocks completed, it was time to do a quick test fit of the components. With the test fit done, it was clear that although the blocks would fit, we'll need to order some 90 degree fittings and redo the heat pipes before the camera can go back into one piece. The water cooling that goes into the camera is just half the battle though, since we still need a radiator and a pump to actually dissipate that heat. So to achieve this, we got a little project box just big enough to house this tiny pump from Alpha Cool and a 120 millimeter radiator. Now mounting for the radiator was pretty simple. We cut a hole into the bottom and then on the top we made some cuts to allow for good airflow. As for passing the water through the box, we needed to fab up some adapters on the lathe to go from standard water cooling sizes to standard industrial tubing sizes. So have you ever used a mill before? I haven't. All right, we're going to make this right here. It's going to help attach the camera to the box that's going to hold all the water cooling stuff on it. Cool. First thing that you want to do is make this top flat. Basically just eyeball it, you're going to take some off. Yeah. This right here is the lock for the quill, so you just lock that over. Now it doesn't go up and down. Pull on this. Okay. And to turn it on, you flip that switch right there. So this is actually forward and reverse. That's not very intuitive. Why is it labeled high range and low range? When you have it in low range, it goes forward at low range. Okay, so that's that way. And then is it this one? Yep. All right. Let's give it some lube first. You can change the speed using this right here. So lower speed, higher speed. That sounds about right. I'd like to say there's more than just guessing it, but you basically just feed it in, kind of crank her in, you'll see when it goes through. Yeah, and just go across. All right, that's good. And there's a break right here. Oh, okay, cool. Yeah, the easiest way to do it so that we don't have too many tool changes is we want for the whole thing to be one inch across. Got it. But the thing is, is that we don't exactly know where any of this is in space right now. Got it. So what we want to do is get an indicator in there. So to change the tool, you take this guy right here, you push the brake, and then, wait, I don't know where the think went. Oh, I know what's wrong. Oh, this goes all the way up. As you can tell, I've only used this like three times so far. Once you've loosened this a tiny bit, you just put something down under like that. Yeah, give it a little tap. Okay. So now, do you want to put the little indicator dude in there? Sure. Does it matter how deep it goes in? It doesn't really matter. Okay, so you're like really giving it. Yeah. Okay. So let's just bring that down here. I guess we have the zero on this side, so let's move it over there. Also, there's power feed on that, so you can just. Turn it on. You see how it's doing a little wiggle there? Yeah. So you come in, and then it goes true, and then right when it kicks out, it means you're in the right spot. You do this one. So zero, why? So now, if we just go up a bit, it should be right in the center. It is zero. Oh, cool. So now we want to make the holes. So this is our center punch. We're just going to center drill all the little holes. Even on a mill, you need to center punch? Yeah, the drill will like walk all around when it makes contact with the metal. Eyes. It might move around and then kind of go in on an angle. Got it. By the way, people, I'm not a machinist. Go and watch like Mr. Pete or Blondie Hacks or someone. Now, is this actually accurate to freaking, you know, a 10,000th of an inch? It's probably within a thousandth of an inch. Let's say that deep. Yeah. Okay. All right. Our next one's at point seven five. Hey, got him. Perfect. Okay. Neat. So now we change our bit again. Yep. We're going to want to go back to the half inch cutter that we had before because it's a paint in the butt to swap to the drill bit holder. So we want to remove this junk. Yeah. So when you do a cut that's a bit deeper like this, you want to use a little bit of a bit of a bit of a bit. We use conventional milling. So if something grabs, it pushes the cutter out of the piece and nothing funky happens. Whereas if you do it the other way, which is climb milling, you can get a. So you made me stand here specifically so I would get showered in aluminum, didn't you? That wasn't the thought, but it didn't work pretty well. And it doesn't matter that it's smoking like that. No, that's fine. That's the lube smoking, not the actual part. It's like Saturn and. So final hole here. That was my nickname in college. What? So now we get to do the most funnest part. So that's tapping it. It's kind of, this is a pretty dumb way to do this. Well, I'm not the one instructing. You're the one teaching me. We need to go all the way for this one. Oh, we're taking out the whole collet. Hey, there it goes. Trying to hide it, but I'm breathing a little heavily. So full disclosure, I've only done this like three times before. And it's been really scary every single time. Why scary? This needs a lot of lube. Oh, something broke. Our tap broke. Why did it do that? Are you asking me? What are the odds I'm going to know? I don't know. That's how I've done it every other time. It's been fine. How much are those? I don't think they're too bad, like 20 bucks or something. Definitely not what you want to break. All right, so the box that all of the water cooling bits are going to go into is almost done. We have the fittings here that were made on the lathe and they've just been JB welded in there. We also have some gasket material here that the fan header goes through. Everything's just taped up right now because it's going to get a nice coat of black paint. I think it'll look pretty sweet in black. I was reviewing the footage and I realized that something pretty unfortunate happened. So this moved just ever so slightly in the vice because the bottom here isn't perfectly flat. So what that means is that on this side, the O-ring groove is about 10 thousandths of an inch larger than this side. So that means that on this side of the groove, the O-ring isn't getting crushed and over here it is where it's within spec. So we get to do the super fun thing now on the mill where we have to set it up so that we're going to take 10 one thousandths of an inch off of this bit. That's going to be fun. Put that in there. Basically what a dial indicator does is that it's a super precise head here that when it moves up and down, you have a little dial here and that swings around. This one right here is each like little graduation is one thousandth of an inch. I've just done the indicator reading like five times and now I'm checking it on the vice just to be sure. What the hell? I just put it in the vice and eyeballed it and this is flat to within a thousandth of an inch across like you know this little bit. I still don't know if I trust it. It just makes no sense that I just. So you can see that although the indicator went completely flat across here, it's considerably lower on this end than it is over here. It's pretty easy to tell that it's not parallel with like the vice like these two. So I don't have a good way of measuring depth here. So we're just going to just take a little cut. See what happens. Hopefully we are good. 0.05. 0.05. Exactly what we're looking for. This is pretty crazy but we're actually getting really close to the end. So this is the water block that or one of the water blocks that needs to go inside and it's going on this piece of the camera just like that. So we just need to drill and tap the holes down there and we're basically good to put it back together. So I had a bit of an idea. I am going to do the math to figure out where each of the holes go but just as a sanity check because sometimes you know your brain can be a bit dumb. I'm going to just take this like test piece that we have here, lock tight it just right to the top of the surface and then we've got a hole guide. Where did I put the lock tight? Oh there it is. I wish that life had control F. It's dabbing it on. Let's just leave that for a second and let that dry. It's so tempting to just not do the math and just drill them in the center of those. No, we're going to do this right. All right. Make sure this is all tight. Don't want it to move and vice. I also don't want to tighten too much because then it might buckle and that would be a real bad time. These are very fine threaded screws and if we mess them up. I don't even know. We're just not mounting this on one side I guess. It'll be really bad. All right one down. There's so much temptation to just chuck this in. Chuck this in the drill right there and just give her with the bridge board. It's pretty crazy to think that tomorrow this thing's going to be just ready to go back together hopefully. Manegear's Element gaming laptop is available at 25 Micro Center locations as well as on Amazon and features an Intel Core i7-9750H processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q, 32 gigs of DDR4 RAM, two terabytes of NVMe storage and if you purchase it at your nearest Micro Center store you can save an additional hundred dollars. So check out this and other Micro Center specials at the links below. Next time on Linus Tech Tips. Things get kind of sexy. Things get dropped. And things get wet.