1 Attachment(s)
Feedback on my power rack design
I just finished designing a power rack for my home gym, and I would like some feedback (good, bad, and ugly) on it. You can find the 3D model here: link. It is based off the power rack shown here (link), but I made a few changes to (in my opinion) improve the design. The most significant change that I made was I made it possible to place the spotter bars at nearly any height. Additionally, I put the spotter bars inside PVC pipe, which is a pretty simple change that could obviously be done on many other racks, but I haven't seen anyone else do it. Maybe that's because it's a bad idea (if so, I'd be very interested in understanding why), but it would seem to me that it would greatly reduce the wear and tear on the bar from a large weight being concentrated on the extremely small area of contact between the bar and the spotter bars.
A couple notes:
- According to my calculations, each knob should be able to easily generate enough load to support 1000 lbs of weight.
- I put a spacer block halfway up the posts two try to keep the posts straight. This obviously limits the options for placing the spotter bars, but my expectation is that the limitation would be quite minimal. However, I would be very interested in hearing feedback about a better placement location. Alternatively, I could make the spacers at the top and bottom several times longer than they are and remove the center block, but this wouldn't be as effective at limiting the warping as what I currently have.
- I've seen other homemade power racks use black iron pipe for spotter bars. This seems like a very bad idea to me since it seems extremely likely that the pipe would not be able to support the weight when squats get up very high. The steel rod I'm putting in the PVC pipe in my design can be found here: link.
Attachment 7590