Mattress Forum

Yes, sort of. I was actually substituting the skins in place of the Lux-HQ foam. Since I always planned to use one of the skins to act as a buffer between the mattress and the metal platform frame, we'd have to compare the cost of five skins to the cost of one 5" piece of Lux-HQ foam. At $17/ea x 5, the skins come in at $85. The 5" Lux-HQ would have been $204. That's a savings of $119. I'll take that!

No one will ever see the "ratty-looking skins", they're fully encased, and having them in 1" layers allows me to make small (or larger) changes to the setup of the mattress if I so desire. Plus they're much easier to handle than a 5" x 76" x 80" block of foam weighing in at around 52 lbs.

Look forward to see how this feels after a month or so...

Does that frame make any noise?

If they were standard 1" layers, I might agree. But, the end pieces are recommend as single bottom layers specifically for their hard surface on the crust side. So, I can see using one for the top of the foundation, as he did. But, I would bet a dollar that a 5" piece of foam will support and react to pressure and weight more consistently throughout the mattress, than a ragtag pile of end pieces from different manufacturing runs.

I must have misread your original post. I thought you said you had ordered Lux-R, which the website states is $166 for a 6". (5" is $138) I didn't realize the skins were Lux-HQ. 
Also, the website shows the skin price as $22, which didn't seem like that much of a saving vs the equivalent solid piece. Sounds like you've got an uncle in the foam business!

Personally, I still think it would be worth the extra money for a solid piece, as it seems to me, based on logic and physics, that it would react more uniformly, as I stated in response to Jim. Also, it seems like a lot of work to trim all of those irregularly sized pieces so they make a smooth, even, single, mattress-like edge. 

I figured if the mattress ended up being too firm, this would make it easy to take out 1" or 2" of the base foam from either or both sides and add something softer at the top if necessary. (I wanted to keep the total height 11", since that's the height of my mattress cover.)

Wife has no complaints. I feel like I'm tossing and turning quite a bit. We'll see...

Dead silent so far. As noted in original post, when assembling I cranked down the twelve wingnuts pretty firmly with an adjustable crescent wrench, so that probably helps. BTW, there were assembly instructions included (not that you need them). My wife found them under something yesterday.

Yesterday I checked underneath the frame while my wife was lying on her side of the bed to see if anything sags down through the gaps in the metal frame. It looked great... no sagging at all. So I'm very pleased with my idea of putting the cardboard from the frame box on top of the frame for support. The cardboard does not even look stressed or compressed where it meets the thin wires.

The foamdistributing.com website just calls them "Lux Foam". When I originally ordered them, I had forgotten that there is Lux-HQ grade (2.8 density) and Lux-R (1.8 density). When someone pointed that out to me after I ordered, my heart sank a little, as I definitely did not want the lower-grade Lux-R. But when I measured the pieces and calculated the density, they all came in at 2.7 or 2.8, same as the Lux-HQ. Maybe I got lucky.

No uncle in the foam business, but perhaps by buying all those skins I somehow affected the laws of supply and demand! When I ordered my skins on 5/28/10, the HD36 was $15/ea. and the Lux was $17/ea. Now they're $21 and $22 respectively.

It might be worth the extra money for a solid piece (or maybe two, to allow some flexibility). I can't say much about variances in uniformity of reaction, but I figured under six inches of latex, the base foam is simply providing a firm foundation for the more critical medium and soft latex layers.

Regarding trimming, I trimmed my pieces one at a time, but if I could do it over again, I'd stack the six 1" layers and trim them all at once. This would involve just two cuts — the same amount as cutting a solid piece — and would insure a uniform edge. I just didn't think of that... until now.

I went super cheap on the base foam ($85 total for 5") simply to get as much mattress as I could for as little $$$ as possible. By shaving the budget here, I was able to go for 6" of latex instead of just 4". It was worth it to me. I almost went for an all-latex mattress, but that would've been so much more and I wanted to be sure I liked latex before shelling out $1400. So I decided for $85 I couldn't go too wrong.

Someday I may replace the base with a latex core. That'll be awhile, though!

That might be nice and all. But, if the PU is working well as the base layer, why change? I could see choosing all-latex for the initial purchase, trying to go all natural avoiding synthetic products for health or environmental reasons, or for comfort of course. But, if the comfort is there, and you've already made the environmental impact by initially purchasing the PU, why swap the base layer? Use the money towards a new keyboard or something. Rock on with your bad self.

Planning to swap only when the PU foam gives up the ghost... hopefully it'll be a number of years before that happens.