cowwboy

Well after constantly fighting keeping towels, purses, bags, etc, off of my amps I decided why not utilize this abundance of water the boat sits in. That and it's pretty dang fun to have water cooled amps. I knew bazooka had a water cooled kit back in the day. And my buddies shop had modified amps before in show cars. So why not. The Digita Desgins amp I did have to mill the cooling fins down to attach the tanks I built. But the DD amp is hidden between the seatback and the hull so was not worried about the appearance. Don't crucify me on the power distribution, it had a poly cover over it and has since been swapped for a fuse block. Now for the Arc's I wanted the heat sinks to look nice. I wanted the open side to be poly-carbonate so you could watch the water go through. So I worked with a buddy to put my idea into a 3-D model. They are 1" thick aluminum with the passages milled out with 3/8" NPT ports. I run Arc ks series for all but my sub. They utilize the bottom of the amp for the heat sink rather then the top so it was easy to sandwich a water jack to the bottom of the amp without modifying the amplifier. One thing I did have to change was adding more bolts to hold down the poly front cover to prevent leaks as the original design didn't have enough holding pressure when using O-rings. I have also switched to using RTV to help with the seal. This picture is after two years of service. You can see the crud from the water and how over time some of the poly has cracked around the bolts. I pressure tested all of the coolers before they went into the boat. The tank coolers were pressured up to 300 psi and held for 12hrs with no loss of pressure. The poly fronted coolers I was afraid of cracking the poly so only tested them to 50psi for 12 hrs. Now for the lessons learned, Oklahoma / Texas water is quite nasty. So while it looks cool seeing the water go through, the water itself is quite nasty looking. Also kind of sucks having to winterize your stereo. We do an annual multi city river trip that we have to carry our overnight stuff as we stay in hotel as we go along the river. It was nice being able to have my entire compartment full of overnight gear for 10 people and not worry about the stereo overheating in 100 Degree weather. It really is nice when I can run the stereo full tilt in 100+ weather and the amps are ice cold.