I finally got a qoute from Chris at Timbernation via email today.
$140 w/o spikes, $170 with spikes, black lacquer maple (see dimensions below).
I've also been looking into granite while waiting on Timbernation, and after talking with Gpdavis1 he suggested buying local as freight charges may be in excess of $300 for granite. After some legwork, I found a local shop that is going to make me granite platforms in Absolute Black, 26" x 16" x 3/4" with soft rounded edges/corners for $140 apiece. This dimension will give me a 2" border around the base of the speaker, and the soft rounded edges will tie in nicely with the "skirt" at the bottom of the VR-4's. One reason I decided to go with granite is the 3/4" thickness vs. 2.5" for the Timbernation platform (1.5" spike, 1" board). This combined with bearing height would jack the speaker up quite a bit. Besides, the granite is frigging beautiful, and heavy! If the tweeters are too high, I will angle the M/T unit so it fires down at the listening position using sorbothane bumpers (I'm not so sure this will need to be done though). Once slabs/speakers are in place I'm going to "revisit" speaker positioning. I will then level and let settle, and possibly relevel after settling. An audiophile bud is going to bring over his Aurios Pro-Max bearings, so I don't have to shell out the dough for two more sets just yet. It's going to be a long process as the shop is three weeks out, then all the tweaking. And finally, we'll see (or hear) if having the speaks up on bearings is worth all the frigging trouble I'm going thru!@#$%&! Why do we do it to ourselves???
All kidding aside, it's a fun project that I'm looking forward to,and if nothing else, I'll spike the speaks to granite with Audiopoint disc's in between and it will look really cool...