A little story about an unhappy customer (35 Pics)

Let me take you back to the summer of '14. I was working for a fairly large computer company, building high-end gaming PCs, many of which were watercooled. Around this time, acrylic tubing was becoming more mainstream and manufacturers were starting to release put out their own products, instead of builder looking at the plumbing section of their local hardware store.

Usually, I'd spend my days building predefined PCs, which sometimes had a different graphics card or a different colour schemes, but were mostly the same thing. One morning, my boss came to speak to me with a big grin on his face. He said he had a customer who wanted a fully custom build. "OK" I thought. "He's got around 5-6K to spend and wants it fully watercooled"... Things were sounding more interesting. "He wants to use acrylic tubing, and you can design it yourself". Cue the gif of Vince Mcmahon falling off his chair. Now, I enjoyed my job, despite the monotony that came with it at times, but this was something extra. Something that had never happened before, and something I was rather looking forward to.

So we started with the hardware. Back in 2014 this was a pretty sweet setup. SLi Titans, Rampage IV board, 4930k etc. Now the guy said that he wanted 2 reservoirs and 2 pumps, but wanted a single loop. I tried to convince him to run dual loops if he wanted 2 of everything, but he didn't want that, so I obliged.

He chose the 900D, which was the watercooling meta at the time. Huge case, loads of space, plenty of room for his watercooling hardware.

I started by stripping a lot of the case out, and moving things around. Unlike most of the builds I was used to, this one I was allowed to cut up the case to really make things the way I wanted which never happed with our "off the shelf" builds.

After that, hardware was tested.

And the CPU was overclocked. It took a few chips to get a stable 4.5GHz overclock on a crappy cooler. Once we had the right chip we knew it would be fine under water.

I had built thousands of PCs at this point, over a hundred watercooled, but never built with acrylic before so this was going to be a challenge, but one I was ready for.

The fittings the customer chose, were Monsoon. They looked awesome, and just like their regular compression fittings, but they really sucked. There was a part that screwed into the G1/4" thread, but that piece was flat with a rubber o ring on the top. There was then a acrylic piece, which also had an o ring inside that needed gluing onto the acrylic pipe to form a collar. Finally, this was screwed down onto the first part, like a normal fitting. More on this later.

Some of the acrylic cuts were nice and simple.

Others needed a bend, no biggie.

Others needed a couple of bends.

Monsoon had their own pipe bending kit that I used and it was fairly decent. So I built a jig, and came in, unpaid, over the weekend to practice and get all of my tubes bent to start the build on the Monday.

Some pieces took a few attempts.

Here you can see a full day's work. Lots of measuring, bending, cutting, redoing. That's after thinking of the best routes and test fitting.

Once they were all done. Acrylic collars needed gluing onto each end and then curing under UV light.

Obviously, I needed to make sure the compression part was on before curing the glue... Luckily I started on the small straight pieces, and didn't have to rebend anything.

Once the collars were sorted, I could start putting everything together.

You can see here some of the attention to detail that I put into this build.

Trying to make everything perfectly parallel.

Even behind the scenes things were as neat as I could get them. I had to use some coupling fittings to join 2 lengths of acrylic for some of the longer routes, just so they'd remain hidden.

On this piece I wanted the bend to be hidden, so I curved the pipe around the radiator and added a 180° turn into a 90° fitting to make it work.

5 days after starting the build, it was finally all together and ready to fill up!

The back wasn't as tidy as I'd like, but there's not a lot you can do when using extension cables and wiring all fans up to the front panel. But it was hidden and the rear panel fitted with ease.

Here goes nothing; day 6 and starting to fill up.

Barely even started pouring the fluid into the reservoir and it started leaking. So I drained down, found the problem, and fixed it. One of the collars had come off when tightening the compression fitting, so it wasn't too bad.

The next leak came from underneath. Sorted that one and tried again.

This time it was the other end of the same pipe. So I redid the entire piece ever so slightly longer so there'd be less pressure on the fitting. That sorted that problem.

Basically, every new part that eventually filled with fluid, leaked.

This thing was an absolute disaster. But after 2 days of filling, draining, fixing, repeating, there were no more wet patches anywhere!

Except for this absolute bastard that stayed hidden throughout leak testing. It wasn't until removing the tissue paper and cleaning up the pipes that I found a slight crack on one of the bends, meaning the whole system needed draining and the pipe rebending all over again. Fantastic.

At this point, my mat was about 80% fluid.

After 5 days of building, 3 days of fixing, and a day of leak testing/benchmarking, it was complete. One of the cleanest builds I had ever done. I was so happy with it. The rest of the team were happy too, not one person could find fault, beyond a cable that dropped down out of place.

The only person unhappy was the customer. We had sent him photos of the build before shipping it and I can still remember sat at the phone to him, hearing him say "I just don't like it". He said that watercooling was meant to be everywhere and "on show", and that he could have done it better himself. Well, the customer is always right, so we sent him the parts out, all dismantled and some flexible tubing for him to have a go himself. We thought that was the end of that, until 5 months later he had some issues. Now normally, we wouldn't offer system support unless we built the system ourselves, but becuse this guy had spend so much money with us, my manager decided to be nice and bring it back to fix. I was not prepared for what I was about to see.

THIS is what he sent back.

Cables, everywhere.

I mean, everywhere.

You couldn't even see the pumps anymore.

Not only cables everywhere, but fittings, on top of fittings, on top of fittings..

On top of more fucking fittings.

What the fuck is even going on here?!

He didn't even screw the graphics cards in place so they fell out during shipping, despite us sending out expanding foam bags to prevent any damage.

This is how the back of the PC literally fell open, from the bulging back panel barely holding it all in.

I just can't even.