How To: DIY Cable Pulley Home Gym System for $25

when you're building the home gym doing it for cheaply as possible is typically the goal and so I suggest doing do-it-yourself equipment today we're going to be building a DIY cable pulley system for lat pull-downs low rows that sort of thing for 25 bucks let's get into it [Music] hey guys this is coop from garage movies.com and today we're building a DIY cable pulley system I've seen quite a few of these I've used quite a few of them and so I'm gonna give some tips and tricks on things that I think to make the best cable pulley system and to make it for as cheaply as possible yes in the intro I said 25 bucks so just to prove that's about what it's gonna cost it might be a little bit more it may be a little bit less but here is my receipt we see here twenty two dollars and one cent and that included some super glue that I'm using for a different project so if you want to see that project make sure you subscribe because that one's gonna come out probably next ok this is the lay of the land I went to Home Depot actually I'll show you some of that footage right now here in Home Depot gonna see what they've got we've got coated cables here you can you can go as heavy as this I would suggest going with a coated cable that's probably around a quarter inch actually 3/16 you can do uncoated you could do 1/4 or 1/8 of an inch but I think the quarter-inch are actually 3/16 inch is gonna be heavy enough it's got an 800 40 pound weight working load limit pretty much everything you're gonna need is actually gonna be in this section at Home Depot so we're looking at single pulleys carabiners wire rope clips it's all over here including the cutter and the cable you need you're probably gonna have to ask somebody to cut the cable for you but I typically just cut myself I make the rules [Music] good to go hey what do you think you're doing walking out of Home Depot with the goodies it costs me a total of twenty two dollars and one cent and that included some superglue that I'm using for a different project so add some carabiners in there it's gonna be a little bit more add some chain if you need that for your connections but all this for under 25 30 bucks let's go baby okay we're back from Home Depot whoo-hoo we've got all our stuff let's show you kind of what I got first this is probably the most important if not the second most important piece of the entire project and this is a pulley okay if you're gonna do a low road you're gonna want two of these if you're just gonna do a single pull down you're gonna want one there's various types I suggest this one because it's got a cotter pin where you can pull this out so if you need to adjust any of the cord you can do so easily it also has a swivel at the top and it's got a 420 pound working weight you're not gonna be pulling more than that and it's pretty cheap okay so this is probably the one I'd suggest for most people in addition to that we've got our cable now this is a I believe it's a quarter-inch cable maybe an eighth of an inch cable and then it's wrapped in plastic please please please heed my advice on this buy the one wrapped in plastic in fact the one that this is kind of based on is spud Inc it's one you can buy for pretty expensive it always used a cable that wasn't wrapped in a coating and it ended up fraying all the time it's just annoying not or difficult to use so buy this one okay so our first actually let me show you what else we have we also have some clamp sets with these bad boys we're gonna clamp the cords together you're gonna need multiple of those you're also gonna need some carabiners to attach it and then you can add some chain and things like that to attach to the rack that's kind of up to you but I'll show you how I'm gonna build it so let's go over to the rack and measure this out now I bought way too much the reason I bought too much is because I don't like having to go back to the hardware store and this stuff is so cheap it's like I think I bought 150 inches for like 4 bucks or something much cheaper than I thought but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna attach to the up or this crossmember up here and I've got this little bad boy in there okay you are probably not gonna have one of those you're probably gonna have to just attach it to the crossmember which you can do so with chain or rope or anything like that I'm just going to attach my pulley to that because I've got it there so just a measure I'm gonna put mine through there I'm gonna attach mine to a weight post or like a plate pin see if FedEx okay I'm gonna attach those to a weight post or plate pin and that's gonna be about 20 inches off the ground so I'm trying to figure out how do I get a full stretch on a lat pulldown so that you know I'm basically able to go through the full range of movement so I'm gonna put it about there and then I think when I'm sitting down I'm gonna be about here so I want some extra length to wrap it put that a little bit farther to wrap it so I'm gonna basically measure it off here so this is probably where I'm going to cut it or wrap it around okay to make this process rather simple I'm gonna do one edge make sure it's good and then do the other edge or other corner so you have your cord you wrap it around and this is where you attach these clamps so you're gonna put this here in the eyelet you don't have to use these I definitely suggest using them they're gonna prevent it from wearing out so you wrap that around there then you're gonna take your clamps like right here and you're gonna wrap it around I do have approached it for you some words of wisdom from coops dad passed to me that's now passed to my sons and passed to you guys okay and this goes like this you never want to saddle a dead horse okay so what that means is you never want to place this which is considered the saddle on the ink on the length of cord that's considered dead it's not working load it's not being used so you want to put it on the other side so I'm gonna put this on here wrap this on here and then tighten it down and what's the movie magic we can be finished in three two one boom there we have it there's your first one I would suggest doing two to three of these just to make it tight it also depends on how much weight you're doing but I'd say do two to three that way it doesn't come undone okay this is gonna live about there with the plate post wrap that around so then I want this to be probably about there maybe a little bit more right there so like I said this is going to I'm gonna have a lot of extra cord you can cut this off easily but I wanted to get it an idea bite it so I know where I'm going all right now let's repeat the process with the clamps remembering not to saddle a dead horse and I'll have that completed in three two one boom we're done with this in so now we have two ends right here that are completed they're not fully completed they're completed for me because I'm just gonna give this to buddy but I would suggest adding a couple more you know while we're here let's go ahead and add a couple more just so you can see what it looks like okay I went ahead and added the others for even extra protection you can add more I think I'm out now I've got a couple more so you could these packs come with multiple I'd probably add up to three depending on how heavy you're going but this should be fine so your clamps are on you've measured the length I mean this is really how easy this DIY is and wise don't suggest buying one of these I suggest just building it and really like the one you're buying isn't gonna be that much better anyways this would actually be better because it's got a coated cable so now we're going to run over to the rack I'm gonna take my pulley system here we've got our little pulley I'm gonna take it out this little this little guy is gonna be very helpful for us because it's got this little pin so what I'm going to do I'm gonna pull this little cotter pin out here get that off right there okay pull that out then pull all that all the way out then I'm gonna put it back in okay if you have one that doesn't have this because they do make them that doesn't have one that's removable you want to make sure that you put this on obviously before you clamp the clamps down you screw the clamps down because it's just not gonna work okay then I put that on there okay so as you can see we are good to go and I'm telling you although this is made of just general hardware equipment from Home Depot it's very smooth it is it feels great mainly because this coat this cable is coated okay so then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna attach it to my little hook up there like I said you can do this multiple ways you could add a chain and wrap it around the cross member you could add chain wrap around that you could add some sort of cord what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take some cord that I have some webbing and just thread it through here and put it up there so I'm gonna go grab that so I have my carabiner here then I'm gonna attach this carabiner up there so you can do webbing or something else this is very easy as quick-release do you want something that's stronger than this carabiner get a locking one just make sure that it's gonna fit to this hole because this hole isn't super big attach it up there I'm locked in I'm then gonna take some carabiners here attach them on either side so I can quickly attach things again you can buy these carabiners in packs and you can buy really cheap ones you can also buy I'm locking they last forever and you can use them for a lot of different things okay if you're looking for like a really nice carabiner go with like a climbing carabiner from Omega but if you just want something that cheap that works this is it okay so we now got our length our general length this is gonna be maybe a little bit like short for me or a little bit long excuse me but you can easily size this up by undoing these and pulling it through really quickly so then I'm gonna take my weight plate post which is right over here now if you don't have a weight plate post you can use chain it's really cheap but I'd suggest something like this because you can use it for different things you're then gonna load it just like you would anything else I'll put a 35-pound er along with some pizza pies cuz the length of this I'm gonna get an Omega carabiner I'm then gonna attach it here we're locked in okay now you got to think of handles for this if you just want to go a really cheap route you can get some tape or some rope and then tie knots at the end for like a knot you can get a very cheat you can use bands you get a very cheap lat pulldown handle that's probably what I'd suggest and what I'm gonna use this is just a cheap one that came with a different piece of equipment so then you can attach it on there and you now have a lat pulldown tricep extension overhead pulley system for around 25 bucks I'll show you how it works okay so you've got your plate post there again I would suggest cutting this so it's shorter but I'm gonna probably shorten this up and lengthen a little bit better this is great because everybody has different size racks mine's a hundred and like 1.4 inches or something like that but yours will probably be 90 inches or somewhere around that so you can adjust this so it's shorter so then if you're in here you can then use this just like any other pulley system well that sounds awful so I noticed this was squeaking a lot from the beginning to prevent that what I suggest is taking some three in one oil you can use wd-40 too just putting a few drops in there I mean this is a very basic and cheap pulley and so it kind of you know is what's expected so you can get something that's more expensive like a climbing pulley but this should help a little bit so as you can hear much quieter I will give you a couple pro tips here one if you want to simulate something that's closer to a lat pulldown where you're not as much of a horizontal row it's more of a vertical row then you can add another pulley to the back of your system so then it comes across and down more expensive not a lot more expensive because you just need extra cord and another one of these cables pulleys that's one way you could do it also another thing you could do is add a bottom cross member or some sort of bar here or something and attach another pulley down here so you can do low rows that's one way you could do it as well you can also shorten this up or add multiple cords because you can take this out and you can use it for tricep extensions like this okay and then lastly this is something that I always complained about and I was like how do I fix this how do I fix this and I think I found a fix when you're doing this the cable wants to start the weight wants to start like flying back and forth especially depending on how much weight and how hard you're pulling so this is how you prevent that you get some chains okay so if you've got some chain great if you don't get some you can buy chain at the hardware store easily you could also use a band for this all you do is you attach that chain to a carabiner what that's going to do is that's going to keep a lot of that weight on the ground at all times so it's going to prevent it from swaying back and forth I'll show you how it looks see how it prevents it from going back and forth beautiful one other way that you could do it just if you want to add band tension or just want to prevent it Swain as well is you can take a band wrap it around your bottom cross member like so take it and then wrap it around a band peg or a hitch pin I'll use this hitch pin right here so you put it in here wrap it around that hitch pin this is now sitting on top of that so that's gonna add some band tension for you when you pull and also keep it on plane and keep it from swaying so much okay that's a twenty five dollar lat pulldown okay it's not as good as a lat pulldown but for those that are when I first started my garage gym I built like everything I didn't have any sort of pulley system this is what I use I use this exclusively and I used it a lot okay it just works it lasts a long time super cheap to make I mean when you're starting a home gym you want to make it cheap there's a good way to get in the door get a lot of use do some things that you can make movements and it works okay what other DIY ideas would you guys like to see what are some other things you'd like to see let me know in the comments below are you gonna make this let me know thanks for watching is coop from grudge and reviews see you next time peace [Music]

Channel: Garage Gym Reviews

Views: 1,377,423

Keywords: garage gym, crossfit, garage gym reviews, fitness equipment reviews, diy cable pulley system, diy squat rack pulley system, diy home gym, home gym ideas, coop garage gym reviews

Id: up1-7i8OVDM

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 17 2020