I've read several postings on drop ceilings and some confirm everything I already figured out but I have a question in need of some expertise or good suggestions. Obviously when doing a basement you will most likely have several areas that need a soffit since you want as much height as possible for the rest of the basement. However, I don't want to do all of them in drywall. I still want access to those areas as well. I have never seen anyone try to place ceiling tiles on the vertical face of the soffit, and even if I do the vertical in drywall, but use tiles for the horizontal underneath, what do you do with the exposed outside edges. The wall channel has nothing to mount to; itÂs too small to cover the drywall thickness and the tile edge. I've seen comments on J-channel, but that only treats the drywall edge, there still the issue of how to mount the tile's outside edge onto a wall channel. I suppose I could drop the drywall lower and back glue it to the J-channel. Or put in a T and just lay the J on the outside lip of the T.

You'd think a manufacture like Armstrong or someone would come up with some type of J & T combined channel. Just need to widen one side of the T and give it an extra 90-degree bend up. Maybe I should paten that.

For the vertical maybe even use the J-channel with CeilingLink T's to hold the vertical panels on the inside as well as the outside.

So has anyone come up with a solution for their drop ceiling basement that is not all drywall for the soffit?