Tekton Double Impacts

I am glad I saw your grille pic. I like the sound of the woofers with grilles but miss the sparkle of the top half. I want to keep my current grilles and have thought about asking Eric for another half set...but I fear it may be a year until I get them, hehe. Yours look great!

Did you maintain the bevel on the upper slat or just cut it off at the half piece slat?

Yes, I kept the top bevel for a factory look. What I did was remove the uppermost rail (it is very lightly glued and stapled), cut the verticals to about 1” above the middle grill mounting  holes. Then sanded the the side verticals to match the top bevel. I used five minute epoxy while holding in place. You could also sparingly use Gorilla glue. Touch up the sanded side bevel profiles with black paint so the the wood color doesn’t show through the black grill cloth. I like the look of mine and can still enjoy the top end sparkle and dispersion and don’t have to worry about my darned dogs marking territory. 

Another half grill build
Tried out the DIs without grills to make sure they sounded better and tt02, Eric, and others above are right -- they do.
So I cut down my grills ala tt02 and VOILA -- there is added presence, lifelike timbres, and a bit more punch.
HOWEVER, what I really notice is how much better they look. The boxlike nature of the lower half is complemented by the action look of the top set of speakers and the overall result is tons better than the DIs either with or without grills alone (are you listening, Eric?).
My approach differed from tt02s. Simply cut the lower half of the grill off leaving extra speaker cloth. Then, the sides had to be chamfered in 4 places to make room for the larger woofers (Dremel works fine here). Glue the cloth back on, transfer the Tekton icons back over and you’re finished. First one took an hour (because of the chamfers) and the second 15 minutes.
My only concern has to do with potential time delay of the woofer with a grill blockage slowing down its response by comparison to the rest of the drivers. Any ideas here?

 craigI59
There are likely lots of ways to skin a DI grill. I too, prefer the appearance and sound of the half grill in place in addition to the practical reasons! Time delay, if there is one, would be purely academic at best. Low frequencies travel so much differently anyway and the sound difference of grill cloth and thin frame over and around the woofers would, at best be negligible. How many serious music listeners are using a 2.1 system with a sub without much concern of time delay? I have no doubt Eric voiced the DI’s without grills. If there IS a slight time delay or defraction of some kind, the benefit of the half grill by far outweighs a small deleterious sonic effect. 😎