help building reservoir

i've decided to make my own reservoir because i heard that most commercial one leaked and i was wondering it it would be better to have a longer more shallow reservoir to increase the surface area and allowing the bubbles travel less distance to the top of if i should go with a more boxlike one where the water slows down more to give it more time to cool down

I assume that you are thinking about making yours out of either Acrylic or Lexan. In that case I would say that you are better off buying a commercial res than building your own if in fact leaks are your biggest worry. I make my own out of Lexan and it worked fine for over a year without leaking and now I have been using a DangerDen for over a year and it has not leaked yet. Unless the res springs a leak at the barbs or the fillport I see no reason for it to leak. Because any one that is made reasonably well is going to be solvent cemented together (meaning the pieces are all bonded at the chemical level making essentially one big piece).

Others may have had different experience than me but as far as I am concerned making one is a PITA so I would recommend buying one.

If your not dead set on making one the MCREs from swiftech is good

A small res (small being less than a few gallons) will have a negligible affect on cooling. Also res thats too shallow is likely to allow air to be sucked into the loop.

Make the res so that it fits best in your rig, otherwise go for a T line or commercial res.

JamesXP said:

If your not dead set on making one the MCREs from swiftech is good

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I agree.

never seen any complaints about it!

and it is quiet under high flow rates...

JamesXP said:

If your not dead set on making one the MCREs from swiftech is good

Click to expand...

Agree, they are cheap and leak free, save you the trouble cutting plexiglass and glueing together

del_signo said:

i've decided to make my own reservoir because i heard that most commercial one leaked and i was wondering it it would be better to have a longer more shallow reservoir to increase the surface area and allowing the bubbles travel less distance to the top of if i should go with a more boxlike one where the water slows down more to give it more time to cool down

Click to expand...

I got into the res making thing a while back due to the fact that I simply didn't like the any of the designs that were available, and none of them worked well. The Swiftech Microres wasn't out at the time. Bay reservoirs are a waste of time to me as they simply don't work well. If leaks is your concern, buy a Microres and be done with it.

Bleeding well isn't about area, it is about slowing down the water and the direction it goes in. Trying to make a box res is very, very difficult as it is nearly impossible to get perfectly straight cuts in acrylic which make it very hard to seal the joints. I found that using round acrylic tubing with ends solvent welded on made it much easier. I had some ends laser cut from Nova plastics on Ebay as making round cuts is also very tough. You would to use 1/4" thick acrylic.IPS weld-on #3 or tap acrylic cement with syringe is the weapon of choice for solvent. It runs like water though so you have to tape any joints you are going to weld together.

It took a lot of trial and error to get the hang of it, but in the end for me making my own res was the only way to go. Mine works very well, and it integrates into my custom case in a way that no commercial res would. I need to take some new pictures of my rig with my new camera.



I made a slight mod to this res not in the photo as I plugged the top barb and made an additional barb coming out of the backside near the top which runs to a fillport. I found it worked better this way for my setup. I also cut the top barb level with the inside of the top and did the same for the top rear barb.

Wow, very cool voigts!

I guess if you know what you are doing you can do anything