Rolling bumper plate storage

Just need to set up for the change plates

Now that I’m getting the gear together to practice Olympic lifting, such as my lifting platform, and bumper plates, I need some storage. The vertical plate storage was built for 20 and 25kg steel plates and I wanted a larger rolling storage system for bumper plates and change plates. Pinterest was really handy for this; I found a really good guild by Greg Everett, and a similar one on wheels. I originally wanted all my plates on one large rolling rack, but it was going to end up being 250kg or so of plates and it was going to be too big to move around and require expensive wheels. So I decided to put only my bumper plates and change plates on this one. UPDATE: For the finished product click here.

This project used less than a sheet of plywood ($80), a few screws and a little bit of no more nails, so it cost less than $100, but it did take 3-4 hours.

First I calculated the total width of all the plates I was going to buy and found it would be around the 500mm mark. So with room to add a few more plates and tidying up change plates I decide to make the rack 900mm internally. Now for the tricky part, I wanted the plates to sit on the bottom and only just touch the sides but not have too much weight on the edges. So I had to calculate the size of the arc. I chose to make the sides 150mm high. Now the width of the plate is 444mm making the diameter 222mm so the calculated width of the arc is 420mm (You can check my maths here). I made the base board 460mm wide so the 20mm ply sides would sit on top. I then cut the ends so that they would over lap the sides and base, but that’s not necessary. 

The strengthening bars along the bottom

 I glued and screwed this all together, and then I added two strips of ply to the base for added strength. I then screwed on 6 wheels each rated to 40kg giving me a total of capacity of 240kg, more than I need. I then stacked my plates into the rack in pairs and screwed in the dividers with 1-2mm or room either side of the pairs. I also screwed these from the bottom. When that was done I sanded the edges down, particularly the edges in contact with the plates to protect them from damage.

The plate dividers

Then with the space at the end I chose to add some racks for barbells or in my case 50mm dumbbells (my fat dumbbells with live there when I get them back from a friend). The internals of these are spaced at 50mm; however the barbells require more spacing than the 20mm of ply to allow them to fit, so I added spacers of 8mm ply so that I can fit barbells sided by side. I have room from 5 of these racks, so that’s two pairs of dumbbells and one bar.

For dumbbells and barbells

I’m really happy with the end result; I’m not particularly good at woodworking so it’s not pretty but it’s strong and does its job well. I can roll it away when I’m doing my gymnastics and bring it back to centre stage when I’m squatting and deadlifting. 

One other option for those with more space would be to build it as a bench, I believe Greg Everett has done this but I don’t have a link to it.

Also I am yet to tidy up the change plates, I’m waiting on two 5kg bumper plates and another set of smaller plates before I finish that up.

UPDATE: For the finished product click here.