Hi everyone,
OK. This is pretty much an identical post that I put up at AVS, so if you saw it there, yeah, you saw it there, too. Pretty much cut-n-pasted with the exception of the paragraph that you are currently reading. Also, I'm sure many of you already saw these pics in my other thread, but read on...
I recently did an IB install in my living room floor. It hangs into the crawlspace using a manifold that holds four of the Mach5 MJ-18 18" drivers. Overall, I'm very pleased with it, but that's not why I'm posting tonight.
The reason I'm posting is to discuss the grille that a friend and I made to cover the IB's opening. I looked around for a solution at the local home improvement shops (Home D, Lowe's, etc.), as well as grille and grate vendors both locally and online. The problem was that they either didn't have what I wanted, they didn't have what I liked, or what they did have was too expensive. To make a long story short, I'm friends with a guy that owns a machine shop, and he helped me make a grille to cover the opening for my IB (OK, he didn't "help" me, he pretty much did everything while I sat around lookin' pretty). Anyway, I think it turned out pretty sweet. It's made of 3/8" aircraft aluminum with some rather simple holes cut into it, a chamfer around the outside and a simple rotating/random orbit sand job for the finish. It can easily hold 200 lbs standing on it.
Aside from just chatting about it, I'm curious to what someone would be willing to pay for such a thing. I told him that there may be a little market for these things, and I thought that I might also be able to help out the IB community by offering a simple, strong, attractive grille/grate to cover IB openings. Please note that I'm not really trying to sell these at this time. I'm just trying to display what we made, to see if there's a market, and to see what opinions on price might be. Note that the holes that are actually cut into the material can be pretty much whatever you like -- squares, circles, paisleys, a silhouette of your girl (WAF!!!), whatever! Also, if you have an opening in a wall or ceiling, the material used can be much lighter than 3/8", so don't think of floor installs only.
Anyway, there are three pictures attached of serial number 000000, so let me know what you think!
Thanks!
IBGrilleCloseup.jpg IBGrilleCorner.jpg IBGrilleFinished.jpg