Hack for bottom-firing speakers?

[Ace2213]

I have an Acer ES 15 laptop and like many laptops that have come out in the last couple of years, it has bottom-firing speakers. At first this didn't bother me because I just assumed they were trash, but when I tilt the laptop upwards facing me, the speakers actually sound pretty good.

Opening it up, it's clear that there is plenty of empty space in the chassis around the speaker modules. This got me thinking. What if I could block the existing speaker grills, move the speakers a little bit more to the front and cut open new grills in the part of the chassis that curves up facing me, resulting in a drastic improvement in sound quality without affecting the aesthetics? 

The first problem I ran into is the material. I thought the chassis was made out of plastic and would be easy to cut into. It's not. It's either a very rigid plastic or aluminum that is for some reason coated in plastic.

I searched extensively for something like this online and surprisingly found no success stories of existing implementations. And I personally lack the expertise, equipment and really everything needed to do this myself without screwing up majorly.

So I decided to ask here. Has anyone tried such a thing? And if so, how successful was it and how did you go about doing it? If not, how do you think one could go about doing something like this without completely ruining the chassis?

[jdally987]

Alright sorry to necrobump, but I found this thread on google and like the OP said, I can't find any implementations or discussions on this type of thing anywhere else. Also wondering if anyone can think of ideas.
 

I have an LG Gram 17, and I've opened up the bottom many times and noticed the speakers right in the middle of a sea of empty space in the chassis as well. I'm not sure about cutting open the metal alloy case on this thing, but I do have a dremel and if I knew there wouldn't be any big problems from doing something like this, I might just give it a shot.

[HenrySalayne]

This empty space is a Helmholtz resonator with the speaker. Drilling some additional holes might change the sound drastically and make it even worse.