Today I’ve got three items which are kind of homemade, in that I repurposed them to work as fitness gear, but they are not really ‘homemade’ in that I didn’t build them myself.
Jump box
First up is my jump box, it stands 640mm high (25 inches)
and is simply a reinforced cable bundle. I got the idea from a video of Matt Wichlinski
and thought it would be a good addition. Companies buy or use cable wrapped up
on bundles like these of various sizes and I managed to pick one up easily. It
needed to be reinforced to take the weight of me jumping on it so I used off
cuts from various projects. If you make one yourself, your reinforcements won’t
need to be that strong. I need to set up something so that I can make the jump
higher so for now I just hold a 20kg sandbag while I jump.
Climbing rope
The climbing rope is about 4.5 meters and 1 inch thick which
is about $100 worth of rope. I managed to score this one for free as an off cut
from a rope manufacturer so look around and see what you can beg, borrow or
find. All I needed to do was splice an eye into it. I searched around on
youtube and followed the easiest video I could find. The method itself is easy,
but difficult on this thickness of rope. I’ve set it up to hang from my pull up frame,
all I need it a new carabiner which will fit.
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| The eye I spliced in, before and after tape to finish it |
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| First rope climb |
Fat bars
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| Dumbbells |
This is another one I saw on Matt Wichlinski’s channel, I got
the pipe for $40 and gave my brother a box of beer to weld it up for me. The
pipe is 50mm thick, standard size for Olympic plates. The bar is 2100mm long (7
foot) and the dumbbells 470mm long (about 1.5 foot). Super simple all I needed
to do was sand and spray the bars to hold off the rust. These work great, I’ll
try to get a picture I me lifting with them to post. These currently live at a
friend’s house since he has plates, but maybe in the future I’ll buy some
plates and this will be the bar I use at home.
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| Dumbbells and barbell |
