How To DIY Concrete Weight Plates!

hey welcome back to jbhq today we're going to talk about a Timeless topic and that is working with concrete to make your own weightlifting plates so as many of you remember at the beginning of the pandemic a lot of gyms closed down because they thought that a bunch of hot sweaty people breathing heavily inside and in close space was bad for a virus spreading and uh probably was but it left a lot of people like myself without weights to lift to get our gains so I know what you're thinking during that time you could be like oh you do calisthenics oh do stuff that doesn't require weights but um I'm a little dumb and uh I didn't the other problem was I mostly did compound lifts like deadlifts squats and bench pressing and so I didn't really think that buying a set of barbells would really help so I decided to take manage in my own hands and make myself a home gym the only problem was that as demand went up for a bunch of Gym gear cost also went up because supplies stayed the same um I didn't really perform any economics models that's that's what I saw there are a couple things that you need to consider when you're trying to make concrete plates the first is what mold you're going to use now back at the beginning of the pandemic there weren't a lot of companies making concrete molds but now you can find them pretty readily available two big considerations for me when I was trying to find concrete plates was Finding plates that I could reuse over and over again which is kind of the idea of a mold and two I wanted the place to be a true to size of the regular plates that I've been using if you wanted to do this a little bit more economically you can do buckets trash cans anything cylindrical really which leads us to the next reason why I bought these caveman plates is because they had a center Notch where I could hot glue PVC two inch collars on to the center of the mold so when I poured concrete they wouldn't move the next thing you got to consider when making concrete weights is what type of concrete you're going to use so there are two considerations here as well I wanted the concrete plates not to crack and I wanted them to be strong enough to take a general abuse but I wasn't going to be dropping them above my head or from my waist level the first first type of concrete that I went with was an anti-crag fiber reinforced concrete I don't think I did the water to a concrete ratio right or maybe I did something wrong point is it didn't work for me when I demolded them they were fragile I couldn't just put them I didn't feel like they were like solid sturdy weights I even reinforced them with rebar so I decided to go back to the drawing board and I found a high strength concrete that I ended up working really well so now we have the mold the concrete and I told you about a PVC the insert that you're going to put inside the concrete the last thing that you want to add into your concrete is some sort of reinforcing agent to help with the overall tensile strength of your concrete plates construction workers when they're pouring slabs put rebar mesh in the concrete to give it that added strength and to help it from shifting over time this wasn't really going to be a permanent structure but I still wanted to add the strength in there and rebar and concrete added together have a stronger tensile strength than just concrete alone the only issue with rebar is that I didn't want to deal with bending a quarter inch gauge rebar my solution to this was that I found some remesh sheets that I ended up cutting down the size that would fit inside the mold this gave me the added strength that I was looking for at a good cost and was also something that I could do throughout any size of my plates I was making 45s 35s and tens alright so now that you have all your supplies and you have the general know-how about how it's going to go together we got to worry about the physical process of mixing the concrete I had like an egg beater type of apparatus that I bought at the Home Depot and it'll fit right into my drill and so I would just mix it that way there are several other methods that you can use depending on how many molds and how much concrete you're going to do at once you can rent a concrete mixer or you can just go old-fashioned style and do concrete pan with shovel and water and mixing it that way I thought that the concrete mixer with the egg beater typed apparatus made it so that it was a little bit more homogeneous when I mix it all together the only downside and you might find this similarly when you're making cookies or cake in your kitchen with an egg beater is some of the corners didn't really get mixed so I had to use it my trowel and mix it once I got closer to the bottom you have your mold laid out you hot glued PVC to the mold and now you have your concrete that you're ready to pour into that mold what you want to do is you want to make sure that the mold is first clean second you want to pour halfway put in your rebar and then top it off one thing to consider is that I can have a regular trowel those big long rectangles because it didn't fit inside my mold so I had a finishing trowel and then for the 10-pound plates I had an even smaller detailing trowel that ended up working fine the last step of setting up your concrete plates before you let them sit for a while is agitating the mixture now this is a much more important step in my opinion when you're laying slab or doing any construction work where people are going to be trusting the strength of said concrete the reason being is because added air bubbles in your concrete can sometimes compromise the overall structure if there's too much going on after I had agitated and let my plates rest I had them sit in the mold for about three days this was a little bit Overkill but my first couple rounds fell apart on me when I took them out of them old and they were still a little wet so I just wanted to make sure that they were dragged to the fullest extent for being handled after that I let it cure outside the mold for another two to three days before I took a rubbing break and some sealant to the plates the reason I used a rubbing brick is because I wanted to round out the edges and make it as smooth as possible for when I was grabbing it to put it on to my barbell after that I sealed my concrete plates with some weatherproof or waterproof sealant because these were going to be living outside one thing to consider about this whole process is that it creates a lot of dust so make sure you have a respirator on or some sort of mask that will mitigate the amount of dust and stuff that you breathe in all in all it's been about two years since I've made these weights and they're holding up like a gem all right so one thing you might be considering if this is something that you're trying to do as hot as the price compared to regular weights is the added labor worth it so for the molds I spent about 150 dollars in my change I'll put the link down below the one thing to consider is that 80 pounds of concrete is roughly six dollars whereas for every pound of iron iron that you have you have it's about two to three dollars depending on your Source your type of plate so 80 pounds six dollars or roughly eighty pounds a hundred and sixty dollars if you're trying to do some cost analysis I'll leave a list of all the things that I used in the description so you can put it together for yourself I think it's a no-brainer which is why I went with concrete plates as always thank you guys for your time I put a lot of effort into these videos and I'm grateful that other people can find use out of them so with that I'll see you guys in the next one peace

Channel: JBHQ

Views: 11,337

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Id: quQ1izr5Mf4

Length: 6min 30sec (390 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 22 2023