My goal is not a riser so much as to have the entire drum kit and all the stands on a single piece of wood that doesn't bounce. Sturdy. And it has to be cheap and easy. I've read a bit that true risers have all kinds of good and bad sonic side-effects...and I'm just not fancy enough to deal with all of that. So I will not be looking to get any height off the floor. Just to solidify everything.
I think that I will shoot for either a (5 ft x 5ft) or a (5 ft x whatever size fits in the space and means I don't have to cut many pieces of wood) footprint of 3/4 inch to 1 1/8 inch particle board. The bottom to be reinforced by 2x4s. The 2x4s I plan to lay down on the wide edge. I might change my mind about this and put them on the thin edge...but I don't want much air space under the "riser" to avoid the aforementioned sonic side-effects. We'll see. If I lay down the particle board and it does the trick by itself I might not even worry with bracing. If I do the bracing, I'm thinking 6 - 2x4s. Much of the design concept is based on my loft bed.
Update:
Well, the end prodect seems to be working pretty good, but it didn't end up going how I thought it would. I figured out pretty quickly that I wasn't strong enough to move a huge sheet of particle board and that it wouldn't fit in my car. So I changed my mind and bought small sheets instead. Feeling cheap and lazy, I also gave up the idea of cross braces. So here it is:
What this is...is four 2 ft by 4 ft by 3/4 inch sheets of particle board. They were called handy sheets or something like that. On top of that is two 2 ft x 3 ft thin indoor/outdoor carpets with rubber backing. I bought some plates to nail them together, but have decided to see if I can avoid any kind of faseners at all. The final footprint is 6 ft wide at the front and 4 foot long for the bulk of the piece. There's an extra 2x4 tacked on the back to give an extra base for the throne and my vocal mic. It was sort of optional but makes things less crowded. I didn't put a carpet on this section. It is sort of offset...so that the back left side is deeper than the the back right side. It looks uneven because of this, but it works great for the space. I didn't have to move any other furniture and I don't need the base were it isn't...so it is actually perfect. There wasn't a single cut made, hole drilled, or nail pounded. It took 2 hours to put together from the moment I got in the car to buy the supplies to finished.
It works ok. I think it would work better if the sheets were 2 inches deep like the planks I'd been using were. I looked into that, but again...too heavy to move and too big for the car. I have the bass drum and pedal all on one sheet together. That seems to be the key. It bounces a bit on the particle board...but only at the top of the toms...the pedal and bass drum don't seem to be bouncing against each other any more. I played for 2 hours straight last night will no leg pain or difficultly in execution. Played The Drain and Green Day and crap like that with fast bass pedal to really test it.
The sheets were about $6.50 each and the carpets were $9 each. I bought too much supplies...but of what I actually used...the cost was just about $38-40.
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