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Reminds me of the first water cooling setup I've ever built. This was way back in the before times, a few years before Danger Den made their first block. So all we had was home made stuff.
Me and a friend went to a local metal shop and convinced them to give us an off cut of a copper bar. They didn't want to sell it to us, but we said we needed it for a school project and they gave it to us for something like 20 bucks. My friend's uncle had a bandsaw that could cut it, so he chopped it up into slices. The bar was a rectangle, something like 16 by 8cm and the slices were around 2.5cm thick.
I drilled 2 holes from one side, not all the way through and 2 holes 90 degrees to the other ones. This formed sort of a square. I tapped the two holes on the wider side and put in some brass fittings from the local hardware store. I sealed the threads with Teflon tape. The two holes on the side I filled with an epoxy putty, something meant to fix central heating radiators. This got a bit sloppy but it was fine.
The bottom of the block I sanded with a little mouse sander I had. And after that finished it up by lapping the bottom on a mirror and some fine grit wet sanding paper. The block was mounted on the cpu using some bits from the hardware store. Some nuts and bolts and a couple of random bits to put some pressure on the whole thing.
For the water stuff I went to a local pet store that had aquarium stuff. So I bought a little water pump and some tubes. As a radiator I got a damaged mopet radiator, it had a dent in it, but it didn't leak. I got that for like 5 bucks because of the damage from a friend that repaired mopets and motorcycles. The radiator was zip tied to the back of the case, with a couple of holes sloppely drilled for the hoses. I used tape to protect the hoses from the sharp edges. The simple 80mm fan I attached with duct tape as I read the air shouldn't be able to escape from in between the fan and the radiator.
It looked jank af and didn't work very well, but it did work. The pump was a bit overpowered so it tended to cavitate and make annoying noises. I didn't have any reservoir and just bled air from where the hose connected to the radiator. This didn't work great, so air in the system was always an issue. The radiator was aluminum and I used simple anti freeze car coolant, which didn't stop the corrosion. Messing with the whole thing I got water over my hardware a lot, luckily never causing any damage except for an ugly stain in the bottom of the case. But I was proud of the thing I built.
Keeping the radiator on the outside was the norm for a long time. I remember having a radiator about as wide and long as my case (and we had big cases back then). It sat on top of the case with some spacers and large fans that turned slowly. Because of the radiator size it was super quiet. The top of the case was just the black radiator itself and it looked pretty cool. Cases by then had special holes for the hoses to go through. No more drilling your own holes, which never worked well in thin but though sheet steel.