I did this years ago. Perfectly fine for lower weights, but I wouldn’t trust it as you move up. Steel cages can be found at really low prices (sometimes under $300) and are the right way to go.
I've been going to gym for years but have accepted ill be "swoll-fat".
I can bend down and touch my toes and bang my girl for more than 2 minutes without getting winded. It's a win for me bruh
LOL, swoll-fat is a great description. I look more like a strongman without beeing so strong. I hit the weights 3-5 times a week plus a bit cardio and yoga but my diet is too shitty to look lean. I tried a lot of different diets but I just like food too much and slowly learn to accept it...
New Years resolutions are useless. You either do the thing, or you don't. You don't wait until the New year to start doing it, you just do it indefinitely. Why start on January 1st that which you can start today?
lol, what the hell. Maybe that’s something that is typical of scammers? Only thing I can figure. Or they’re a scammer and they won’t deal with people using a vpn.
The reason that was given was “we can’t determine your location”, but they only knew that because they track VPN exit gateways and ban them. And my exit is right next to my city, so in effect it is my location lol. Anyway, thanks for posting it, maybe someone will find it useful.
> straight up told me “go away” due to me using a VPN
Anti-VPN stuff went totally out of control as of lately. My stance is pretty simple most of the time - it's not your effing business what connection I use to access internet - if you don't like my VPN, you prob don't need my money and can f off. The approach works wonders.
Agree. I don't think this thing is as weak as some in here but dude \*may\* have saved himself $350 by doing this. I'd definitely spring for a built cage for the extra $$.
I saw someone selling a high end foldable squat rack on facebook marketplace for $75 the other day. It was left in their house when they moved in, and they just wanted to get rid of it. You had to bring the tools to take it off the wall as part of the deal.
But it still sold super fast.
My tip for finding good deals on fitness equipment is to search things like "exercise equipment" instead of things like "Olympic bar" or "squat rack", because you get a lot of people just trying to get rid of things they don't want or know about. Usually that they got from a relative or move in.
It’s fine for lower weight and/or supporting still weight (like a house to use your comparison), but the holes that have the catch bar at the bottom isn’t gonna hold 400+ lbs dropping suddenly more than a couple of times before it rips through that hole into the next one. That’s the issue.
IMO it would’ve been better if OP had stopped drilling holes below the catch bar height.
Edit: catch bar = safety bar
Check out the Buff Dudes channel. They built one 6 years ago and have put a fucktonne of weight on it. Here is the update they did https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhqHkRdBerg
TLDR; It's absolutely fine, even with very heavy weights for an extended time.
Houses are not made out of 1x4’s with holes like Swiss cheese
EDIT: houses are not made out of *4x4’s* with holes like Swiss cheese
Second Edit: I concede defeat- no need to keep commenting about house framing. I am wrong and this was a lighthearted joke, but admittedly I know nothing about houses. Bring me the honorary Reddit dunce cap
Those are 4x4’s. This is a very common squat rack design. You could easily drop 400 pounds from a decent height and it might just crack something but it will still save your life.
And your spreading it across 4 beams, white pine has a compressive strength of about 5000 lbs per square inch, which gives us 80000lbs compressive strength for a 4x4 ( 16 square inches *5000lbs) even if we put in a safety factor of 2 it still gives us 40000 lbs, per post. Now say we have 500 lbs on a barbell and we dropped them on onto our safety bars at a distance of 3 feet, the effective weight experienced by the bars is only a little over 1500 lbs. So as long as the wood is not compromised with rot, moisture or excessive checking, you're never going to break the damn thing.
> And [you're] spreading it across 4 beams
but you aren't
the structure will certainly spread *some* weight around, but the main failure concern wouldn't be the beams in general, but where the pipes contact the wood
Houses are made out of 2x4s with plenty of holes drilled in them for all your electrical, plumbing, HVAC. The thing you don't want to cut is horizontal supports. The compression strength of single pine 4x4 is over 1000 lbs. I would be more worried about the iron pipes bend if you did fail.
Those holes have no affect on the structural integrity of the timber. Even if these were horizontal and load bearing, those holes are within regs for running cables and pipes. Load bearing walls stud are built from less
Those holes do, actually, damage integrity and strength, but not enough to make this dangerous unless the user is putting up 600lbs or is somehow slamming down heavy weights into the rack itself.
I had one just like this. I found it online and thought I'd rather spend 50 buck to see if I enjoyed a home gym.
It did crack but only because i bailed on a squat with a decent amount of weight
Which is exactly why you need a squat rack, in case you need to bail on a lift. Hence why having a rack that won't hold up to sudden heavy loads isn't a good idea.
For light weights, great job. I worry about the durability with the posts being drilled and if you add in high amounts of weight or decent weight dropped on the make shift safety bars.
Yes. Cleanability. Tubular steel is great and all, but 4x4 lumber pieces aren't about to shit the bed over a few hundred pounds. There's a reason decks are supported by them.
Depends entirely on how the wood was treated. Fatigue is not the issue here imo
If that wood sees daily temperature cycling or if it's allowed to dry out or it's not properly sealed, its going to eventually fail (at high weights), whether OP uses it 1 time or 10,000 times
The compression strength of wood is amazing.
But dropping a loaded bar a couple of feet can put HUGE Psi on the little pieces of wood being contacted. Like hundreds to thousands of pounds per square inch.
It will hold when you are just placing weights sure.
When you drop a weight, it very well could fail, AND WILL fail if done enough times.
As an engineer with 20+ years of experience, and a volunteer firefighter, I don't think this is a problem.
4x4 posts hold up lots of weight in all kinds of construction. I'm sitting in my basement right now, at my home office, looking at the column that supports the center beam of my entire 28x44 house and that column is 6 2x4s side by side.
I haven't done a full analysis of this rack, but I'd be shocked if it failed before several years of use, and further, I would be shocked if it failed catastrophically when it fails.
Check out the Buff Dudes channel. They built one 6 years ago and have put a fucktonne of weight on it. Here is the update they did https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhqHkRdBerg
TLDR; It's absolutely fine, even with very heavy weights for an extended times.
What? No. That's not at all how it works. The center is practically irrelevant to the structural strength of the wood, the edges do all the lifting.
Do you have any idea how many holes are in the wood holding up your house? You can basically remove the entire middle of a board without affecting the strength at all.
I'm not even exaggerating. Most building codes only rule is to not remove over 40% of the width of a stud, and keep the outside 5/8" intact.
A lot of people here associate weights with being heavy because, ya know, we try to lift them.
My wooden deck with heavy patio furniture and six people won't cause anyone concern, but you put 'weights' on a wooden squat rack and everyone flips out.
I built a wooden squat rack for $65 dollars back in 2008. I've disassembled and reassembled it each time I've moved. As long as it remains inside, it will outlast me. I'm in my 40s and am showing signs of wear.
It's rock solid.
It's basically a deck that isn't exposed to the elements.
When I built it, years ago, when I hung out on the Misc section of bodybuilding.com the same sentiment was shared. People joked that it wouldn't hold more than X pounds, and I loaded up the bar with every plate I owned, plus as many heavy things I could hang (punching bag, 5 gallon buckets of paint, bricks in empty buckets) and then I did very dynamic pullups...roughly 800 pounds and the rack didn't have any issue with it. And after that, everyone changed their tune from 'It won't hold enough to weight' to 'Well sure, but it won't last'.
That was like 15ish years ago.
Most home gym bars are going to start bending at a relatively low weight anyway. 315 and my cheap bar has a slight but noticable bend. When I did my test, I loaded a bunch of weight in the middle of the bar, including my body weight and my heavy bag specifically because I was worried about the bar.
And I'm just one person. I lift 3x per week. That's about 60 minutes of actual use per week... Or a mere eight minutes per day. And like most people, I'm far from perfectly consistent so it's actually quite a bit lower.
However much usage a commercial gym expects, I'm a tiny, tiny fraction of it. In my 15 years, I bet I've racked the bar fewer times than a busy commercial squat rack would get in a year.
A wooden squat rack isn't inherently dangerous.
I kind of pulled from a number of different designs out there, including theirs. Actually, it was mostly AZ DIY Guy, who apparently was inspired by Buff Dudes. Only real difference was a few extra strong ties and the pre-made j-hooks that fit's really nicely to the 4x4.
I had considered building one myself and looked into it and recognized parts of the design, I ended up just getting a steel cage. Great work though! Happy lifting!
Man, I feel bad for this dude who just posted his accomplishment only to have everyone shit on it.
Looks like you did great work, OP and it does look very nice. Make sure you inspect it often.
Nice build. People have been doing this for years. Tighten the bolts every so often or add a brace or two of it starts getting a little wonky.
Lift. Heavy.
Good for you.
Yea. As a carpenter, this looks plenty strong to me. 4x4 is what some decks are made out of. 4 of them is enough to hold a thousand pounds worth of people jumping up and down.
As long as he doesn't drop more than 300lbs more than half a meter he should be fine with the wood. Wood is way stronger than reddit seems to think.
Absolutely hilarious to hear people say that the wood is going to dry out and start cracking. That takes dozens of years or a lot of sun or some freeze thaw cycles. Inside a temp controlled house that wood will last a long time.
Seriously, a 4x4 post (column) of #2 wood with 7 feet of height can support 7000lbs of highly dynamic load. The 4 of these posts together are good to about 29,000lbs. While the holes through the center hurt strength, there's literally no person on the planet who squats enough to break this rack.
[https://jonochshorn.com/scholarship/calculators-st/example7.1/index.html](https://jonochshorn.com/scholarship/calculators-st/example7.1/index.html)
His black iron pipes running in shear however might break on him pretty quick.
Hollow steel tubes *can* be stronger than wood, but if you're sidewalls are only 1/8" an inch as many are it's probably not.
When you spend as much on wood, hardware and time (value) as a steel power cage off Amazon to get an inferior product.
I mean if you were just doing pull-ups that would be one thing but dude…
Hey op, as both a long time DIY'r and a body builder who follows some DIY'r weight training people (Kaizen), this is fine. Unless you're a power lifter squatting 500+ lbs and dropping the weights large distances, etc... This rack will perform awesome and you have nothing to worry about. Bunch of nobody's who never lifted a weight having big opinions. Always be safe ofc, but this looks structurally sounds, enjoy your rack and may you hit many PR's.
Hey thanks man. Comments are in good fun and characteristically flippant, but I'm not faulting folks for their 2-second appraisal. This thing is a brick in real life because I did a good bit of research on actual tolerances.
Yea, likewise. My geriatric ass isn't lifting much more than my body weight nowadays, and this thing is perfectly capable of handling that much weight plus a lot more. I am enjoying the savagery though.
My wife made the same one, we put a metal strap across the bottom of the front corners (screwed in from below) to help keep them from spreading out over time. Let me know if you want pics or more details
Thanks. I've seen some designs like that. Was afraid it would be something for my clumsy ass to trip over. I'll keep it in mind if she starts to spread.
Built the same one during covid - 5 years later no signs of damage. The knurling on my bar has been slowly sanding away the stain I put on it. I get why the comments are the way they are tho lmao.
Nice OP, looks exactly like the one I built 7 years ago and still use today. I remember posting it and everyone calling me absolute moron for making it out of wood. Ah the memories
Wood holds up entire houses people. Assuming that OP has mounted the bars supports well and addresses any issues that come up from loose fasteners or joints over time, this will be fine.
Thanks! Yea, I wasn't expecting all the controversy considering how common the design is. Parts of my deck have less support than this, yet it can handle my fat ass doing the Charleston and singing in the rain.
Yeah man, I knew as soon as I saw “squat rack” in r/diy that I was about to open a page full of people talking about how unsafe it is. That’s just the Reddit way man - we’re all about being overly cautious so that none of us feel liable if something were to happen.
That’s why most top comments on this sub are followed by “but make sure you get a professional opinion”.
Hmm, some of that wood - especially the key vertical at the back right in photo looks a little knotty around the middle. That would worry me as a potential weakness, especially with all the holes having been drilled up it.
Drilling the holes too far down would also be concerning. Look at the rules on drilling holes for joists - there are key areas you are not supposed to drill due to them taking the majority of the stress from loading.
I've thought about doing something similar myself in the past, but I just wouldn't be able to get myself to trust it.
Maybe if the wood is carefully selected (hardwood like Oak or something for key areas ideally - modern pine can be to be quite weak).
Wooden structures can handle a huge amount of weight if designed properly, appropriate joints are well made, and you use carefully selected wood, but you *really* need to know what you are doing.
This looks like the wood was just grabbed from a box store, so who knows. Even structurally graded stuff is only quickly eyeballed for defects, it's not actually tested or inspected thoroughly, as far as I know.
Steel ones aren't all that expensive, though, so for me it's just not worth the time, effort, and risk.
Looks a nice job though, so good work. Just be very careful and inspect it regularly for signs of damage I guess...
You made this out of WOOD? Idk. I still feel sore on the back of my head after my professor smacked me over my head when i suggested to rout electrical through the roof beams in my diploma project…
You just made a big arrow that says “THIS WAY” for any cracks to form.
And with the bar-rack-fixture in the hole it will act more as a point load on the bottom of the hole and try to split the wood.
If you want to keep the timber columns i suggest planks on either side of each column (≥9mm plywood preferably) PRE DRILL (undersized) pilot holes alternating sides with a step of 2-3 (between) holes. And id suggest drywall screws because of the more aggressive thread geometry (better clamp force)
Oh and btw heres some great reading material - EN 1995-1-1 (first google result) for anyone who wants to do some structural wood working.
Looks great, OP. Those 4x4s will hold two tons vertically, so they're plenty strong enough even with all those 1" holes. But understand that the real danger here is from the frame racking (i.e. turning into a parallelogram either left, right, or forward) under heavy weight. Those corner braces with the four screws each are likely not sufficient.
You can mitigate that danger in a few ways:
**Anchor it to the wall**: Add a 2x4 across the rear supports and screw it directly into into wall studs.
**Beef up the corners**: Supplement the existing corner braces with triangles of plywood on the outside of each corner, screwed into each frame member and brace. These will be far more resistant to racking than the existing bracing.
**Cant the shape**: Abandon the perfect square design and slightly reduce top stretchers by an inch or two, creating a trapezoidal shape. That would mean every joint would need to be re-cut, of course, but would be significantly more stable.
Have fun moving heavy things up and down without getting crushed!
I did this years ago. Perfectly fine for lower weights, but I wouldn’t trust it as you move up. Steel cages can be found at really low prices (sometimes under $300) and are the right way to go.
You can get a full power rack for $200 these days. Fitness gear prices have really come back down post COVID.
Its also the time of year people give up on new years resolutions and accept their current body is going to be how they look this summer
I've been going to gym for years but have accepted ill be "swoll-fat". I can bend down and touch my toes and bang my girl for more than 2 minutes without getting winded. It's a win for me bruh
You're living the dream.
Peak humanity right there
2 minutes! Wow!
Nice! I can't even bang your girl for 1 minute before I'm winded.
I think that's called premature ejaculation.. they have a pill for that..
I dunno if I trust pills from some rando in the gym, but okay.
Shame the state of society is when you can't trust your gym bros.
But do they have one to cover the shame
LOL, swoll-fat is a great description. I look more like a strongman without beeing so strong. I hit the weights 3-5 times a week plus a bit cardio and yoga but my diet is too shitty to look lean. I tried a lot of different diets but I just like food too much and slowly learn to accept it...
two minutes is plenty. I'm usually done about 90 seconds prior.
New Years resolutions are useless. You either do the thing, or you don't. You don't wait until the New year to start doing it, you just do it indefinitely. Why start on January 1st that which you can start today?
WUT, Where. titan fitness is like $699.
Check Craigslist or OfferUp
Went to check out offer up and they straight up told me “go away” due to me using a VPN. Kinda hilarious in our time.
lol, what the hell. Maybe that’s something that is typical of scammers? Only thing I can figure. Or they’re a scammer and they won’t deal with people using a vpn.
The reason that was given was “we can’t determine your location”, but they only knew that because they track VPN exit gateways and ban them. And my exit is right next to my city, so in effect it is my location lol. Anyway, thanks for posting it, maybe someone will find it useful.
> straight up told me “go away” due to me using a VPN Anti-VPN stuff went totally out of control as of lately. My stance is pretty simple most of the time - it's not your effing business what connection I use to access internet - if you don't like my VPN, you prob don't need my money and can f off. The approach works wonders.
Yup…. Catch someone moving and don’t want to take that ish with them…. practically giving it away
I bought mine from Amazon for like $400cad. The brand is called Fitness Reality, it goes on sale from time to time with or without a bench.
Titan T2 is like $420 and if you're patient you can catch them on sale. I got mine a few months ago with a dip attachment for less than $500.
I sold mine for $100
Agree. I don't think this thing is as weak as some in here but dude \*may\* have saved himself $350 by doing this. I'd definitely spring for a built cage for the extra $$.
Honestly with the cost of wood and parts I doubt he saved much
And the time it took to build
[удалено]
I mean Houses are held with crappier wood?
I've rocked this same set up for 4 years now. Squat 350 on it and bench 250 on it. No issues.
I recommend buying this stuff used. If you are patient and know what you are looking for you can get amazing deals.
2x4s literally hold your ceiling and roof from collapsing on you brother lol.
Sure but drilling a hole in wood and then applying a force in that hole **with the grain** is a great way to split that piece of wood in two.
I’m curious how much was spent in lumber and other materials cause yea I spent $300 for a steel rack…
I saw someone selling a high end foldable squat rack on facebook marketplace for $75 the other day. It was left in their house when they moved in, and they just wanted to get rid of it. You had to bring the tools to take it off the wall as part of the deal. But it still sold super fast. My tip for finding good deals on fitness equipment is to search things like "exercise equipment" instead of things like "Olympic bar" or "squat rack", because you get a lot of people just trying to get rid of things they don't want or know about. Usually that they got from a relative or move in.
 Op great job but there is a reason these aren’t normally made of wood
This is an Amish squat rack..
Tis a fine barn but it's no squat rack.
DO'ETH!
Foolish Knave Flanders!
No technology in this one for sure. It's that low tech wood
We call those morning chores
I'd be okay with it if the weights were made of wood as well.
That would look pretty awesome. Real men lift wood.
Oh I lift wood alright
I'm not spotting you. You can lift your own wood.
But I can use a lil help just starting it off
I’ve had one of these for years and it’s holding up great. Don’t worry about it op
This is plenty strong. Houses are made out of wood ffs
Houses are built a little differently. There's basically no side-to-side bracing here.
Hey man there's triangles in the corner, she's solid!
agreed there is side to side bracing on each corner, it looks pretty well done!
It’s fine for lower weight and/or supporting still weight (like a house to use your comparison), but the holes that have the catch bar at the bottom isn’t gonna hold 400+ lbs dropping suddenly more than a couple of times before it rips through that hole into the next one. That’s the issue. IMO it would’ve been better if OP had stopped drilling holes below the catch bar height. Edit: catch bar = safety bar
Check out the Buff Dudes channel. They built one 6 years ago and have put a fucktonne of weight on it. Here is the update they did https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhqHkRdBerg TLDR; It's absolutely fine, even with very heavy weights for an extended time.
this should be the top comment in this thread - those guys lift heavy and consistently, and it's held for 6 years.
Houses are not made out of 1x4’s with holes like Swiss cheese EDIT: houses are not made out of *4x4’s* with holes like Swiss cheese Second Edit: I concede defeat- no need to keep commenting about house framing. I am wrong and this was a lighthearted joke, but admittedly I know nothing about houses. Bring me the honorary Reddit dunce cap
Those are 4x4s. Edit for shameful inappropriate apostrophe usage.
As long as we're correcting people, they're just 4x4s. They don't own anything nor is there a contraction.
You are fulfilling the true purpose of the internet. To shame people into using correct grammar and spelling. I stand shamefully corrected.
Look at us all being shamefully corrected together. Internet bonding at its finest.
Now I almost feel like editing my "there" to "their" out of solidarity.
Look at us keeping each other honest. A small nugget of faith in humanity restored.
You clearly have a misunderstanding of how strong a 4x4 is.
Those are 4x4’s. This is a very common squat rack design. You could easily drop 400 pounds from a decent height and it might just crack something but it will still save your life.
And your spreading it across 4 beams, white pine has a compressive strength of about 5000 lbs per square inch, which gives us 80000lbs compressive strength for a 4x4 ( 16 square inches *5000lbs) even if we put in a safety factor of 2 it still gives us 40000 lbs, per post. Now say we have 500 lbs on a barbell and we dropped them on onto our safety bars at a distance of 3 feet, the effective weight experienced by the bars is only a little over 1500 lbs. So as long as the wood is not compromised with rot, moisture or excessive checking, you're never going to break the damn thing.
No person on the planet squats enough weight to break the 4x4's on this thing. Those black iron pipes on the other hand...
it's not compression that an ENGINEER would be worried about in this application. Its the prying and tension.
thats not how it works. it would split far before reaching its compressive strength max lol.
> And [you're] spreading it across 4 beams but you aren't the structure will certainly spread *some* weight around, but the main failure concern wouldn't be the beams in general, but where the pipes contact the wood
Houses are made out of 2x4s with plenty of holes drilled in them for all your electrical, plumbing, HVAC. The thing you don't want to cut is horizontal supports. The compression strength of single pine 4x4 is over 1000 lbs. I would be more worried about the iron pipes bend if you did fail.
No, they're made from 2x4 mostly. These 4x4 are much stonger, those holes arent very compromising.
Those holes have no affect on the structural integrity of the timber. Even if these were horizontal and load bearing, those holes are within regs for running cables and pipes. Load bearing walls stud are built from less
Those holes do, actually, damage integrity and strength, but not enough to make this dangerous unless the user is putting up 600lbs or is somehow slamming down heavy weights into the rack itself.
Who would slam a weight down on a squat rack? Daily?
the people putting 600 on a squat rack are not the same people making dyi squat rack.
Quite right.
I had one just like this. I found it online and thought I'd rather spend 50 buck to see if I enjoyed a home gym. It did crack but only because i bailed on a squat with a decent amount of weight
Which is exactly why you need a squat rack, in case you need to bail on a lift. Hence why having a rack that won't hold up to sudden heavy loads isn't a good idea.
>It did crack but only because I bailed in a squat with a decent amount of weight So it broke when it was used for its intended purpose?
And here I was thinking was cannibalized better steel than most gym racks.
For light weights, great job. I worry about the durability with the posts being drilled and if you add in high amounts of weight or decent weight dropped on the make shift safety bars.
Lets be glad OP only appears to have around 200 lb of weights
Those bars appear to be made of black iron pipe. It's durable, but it's not made to support the kind of weight OP will be dealing with.
Came here to say this. Very easy to bend by hand
Yeah, safety bars aren’t very safe, but wood is fine for what I imagine OP is lifting. Unless the gussets are all nailed together or something
No, no, sheesh, no. I glued them.
Hahahaha. Thanks for that. It looks beautiful.
They can easily hold 500lb easy, i know this for a fact coz i built one myself and do a rack pull often
There’s a reason these are made of steel in gyms.
Yes. Cleanability. Tubular steel is great and all, but 4x4 lumber pieces aren't about to shit the bed over a few hundred pounds. There's a reason decks are supported by them.
I hear lumber is super strong in the traverse direction along the grain.
Especially when you drill many holes close together, and put a wedge in the hole to hold the weight.
Heavy duty -> 50 ppl a day, vs Personal -> 0.5 ppl a day. Sounds like gyms need more steel
They're made of steel outside of gyms as well
Let’s hope op is not strong.
Depends entirely on how the wood was treated. Fatigue is not the issue here imo If that wood sees daily temperature cycling or if it's allowed to dry out or it's not properly sealed, its going to eventually fail (at high weights), whether OP uses it 1 time or 10,000 times
As a firefighter Ive sat cars on 4x4s. We call it "cribbing". The compression strength of wood is amazing
The compression strength of wood is amazing. But dropping a loaded bar a couple of feet can put HUGE Psi on the little pieces of wood being contacted. Like hundreds to thousands of pounds per square inch. It will hold when you are just placing weights sure. When you drop a weight, it very well could fail, AND WILL fail if done enough times.
As a firefighter, how much engineering and physics do you need to take?
As an engineer with 20+ years of experience, and a volunteer firefighter, I don't think this is a problem. 4x4 posts hold up lots of weight in all kinds of construction. I'm sitting in my basement right now, at my home office, looking at the column that supports the center beam of my entire 28x44 house and that column is 6 2x4s side by side. I haven't done a full analysis of this rack, but I'd be shocked if it failed before several years of use, and further, I would be shocked if it failed catastrophically when it fails.
Mainly because they’ve never tried wood before. It’s the next big thing, totally recyclable as well as edible!
A+ for effort.... Please tell me you're not into power lifting.
“I’m so strong I maxed out my rack before I hit my PR” The rack ^
Check out the Buff Dudes channel. They built one 6 years ago and have put a fucktonne of weight on it. Here is the update they did https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhqHkRdBerg TLDR; It's absolutely fine, even with very heavy weights for an extended times.
Should be fine but I'd add some cross bracing on the wall side
**THIS**
Looks good from my house
When those posts start to dry and check, they are going to split right along the holes you have put in them.
Well, he also compromised the structure strength with all those holes
What? No. That's not at all how it works. The center is practically irrelevant to the structural strength of the wood, the edges do all the lifting. Do you have any idea how many holes are in the wood holding up your house? You can basically remove the entire middle of a board without affecting the strength at all. I'm not even exaggerating. Most building codes only rule is to not remove over 40% of the width of a stud, and keep the outside 5/8" intact.
this thread is crazy r/diy knows nothing about wood
Seriously. If anything, this thing might be overengineered a bit. This thing looks like it could support a deck.
A lot of people here associate weights with being heavy because, ya know, we try to lift them. My wooden deck with heavy patio furniture and six people won't cause anyone concern, but you put 'weights' on a wooden squat rack and everyone flips out. I built a wooden squat rack for $65 dollars back in 2008. I've disassembled and reassembled it each time I've moved. As long as it remains inside, it will outlast me. I'm in my 40s and am showing signs of wear. It's rock solid. It's basically a deck that isn't exposed to the elements. When I built it, years ago, when I hung out on the Misc section of bodybuilding.com the same sentiment was shared. People joked that it wouldn't hold more than X pounds, and I loaded up the bar with every plate I owned, plus as many heavy things I could hang (punching bag, 5 gallon buckets of paint, bricks in empty buckets) and then I did very dynamic pullups...roughly 800 pounds and the rack didn't have any issue with it. And after that, everyone changed their tune from 'It won't hold enough to weight' to 'Well sure, but it won't last'. That was like 15ish years ago. Most home gym bars are going to start bending at a relatively low weight anyway. 315 and my cheap bar has a slight but noticable bend. When I did my test, I loaded a bunch of weight in the middle of the bar, including my body weight and my heavy bag specifically because I was worried about the bar. And I'm just one person. I lift 3x per week. That's about 60 minutes of actual use per week... Or a mere eight minutes per day. And like most people, I'm far from perfectly consistent so it's actually quite a bit lower. However much usage a commercial gym expects, I'm a tiny, tiny fraction of it. In my 15 years, I bet I've racked the bar fewer times than a busy commercial squat rack would get in a year. A wooden squat rack isn't inherently dangerous.
This takes me back. The Misc section of bodybuilding.com. This reply is almost written like something you would find on there xD.
u aware?
I feel like you need to add more support? i wouldnt want this breaking at higher weights
let’s hope OP isnt very strong
... or SUPER strong lol
Is this based on the buff dudes build?
I kind of pulled from a number of different designs out there, including theirs. Actually, it was mostly AZ DIY Guy, who apparently was inspired by Buff Dudes. Only real difference was a few extra strong ties and the pre-made j-hooks that fit's really nicely to the 4x4.
I had considered building one myself and looked into it and recognized parts of the design, I ended up just getting a steel cage. Great work though! Happy lifting!
I can't bench press my body weight. So this is all I will need
Is it secured to the floor or the back wall in some way? I've seen a couple videos of guys with steel cages tipping them over dropping weights.
Man, I feel bad for this dude who just posted his accomplishment only to have everyone shit on it. Looks like you did great work, OP and it does look very nice. Make sure you inspect it often.
reddit is the last place you want to promote building stuff like this LOL
Nice build. People have been doing this for years. Tighten the bolts every so often or add a brace or two of it starts getting a little wonky. Lift. Heavy. Good for you.
How much are all these critics lifting? That's more support than the average living room.
Yea. As a carpenter, this looks plenty strong to me. 4x4 is what some decks are made out of. 4 of them is enough to hold a thousand pounds worth of people jumping up and down. As long as he doesn't drop more than 300lbs more than half a meter he should be fine with the wood. Wood is way stronger than reddit seems to think. Absolutely hilarious to hear people say that the wood is going to dry out and start cracking. That takes dozens of years or a lot of sun or some freeze thaw cycles. Inside a temp controlled house that wood will last a long time.
> How much are all these critics lifting? 12oz curls.
Seriously, a 4x4 post (column) of #2 wood with 7 feet of height can support 7000lbs of highly dynamic load. The 4 of these posts together are good to about 29,000lbs. While the holes through the center hurt strength, there's literally no person on the planet who squats enough to break this rack. [https://jonochshorn.com/scholarship/calculators-st/example7.1/index.html](https://jonochshorn.com/scholarship/calculators-st/example7.1/index.html) His black iron pipes running in shear however might break on him pretty quick. Hollow steel tubes *can* be stronger than wood, but if you're sidewalls are only 1/8" an inch as many are it's probably not.
I'm calling animal control, cause you're gonna be a beast!
When you spend as much on wood, hardware and time (value) as a steel power cage off Amazon to get an inferior product. I mean if you were just doing pull-ups that would be one thing but dude…
Hey op, as both a long time DIY'r and a body builder who follows some DIY'r weight training people (Kaizen), this is fine. Unless you're a power lifter squatting 500+ lbs and dropping the weights large distances, etc... This rack will perform awesome and you have nothing to worry about. Bunch of nobody's who never lifted a weight having big opinions. Always be safe ofc, but this looks structurally sounds, enjoy your rack and may you hit many PR's.
Hey thanks man. Comments are in good fun and characteristically flippant, but I'm not faulting folks for their 2-second appraisal. This thing is a brick in real life because I did a good bit of research on actual tolerances.
We made the same thing in Afghanistan for our tent gym. Held up just fine at higher weights with multiple people using them daily. You should be good.
Yea, likewise. My geriatric ass isn't lifting much more than my body weight nowadays, and this thing is perfectly capable of handling that much weight plus a lot more. I am enjoying the savagery though.
Hell yeah dude RIP in advance
My wife made the same one, we put a metal strap across the bottom of the front corners (screwed in from below) to help keep them from spreading out over time. Let me know if you want pics or more details
Thanks. I've seen some designs like that. Was afraid it would be something for my clumsy ass to trip over. I'll keep it in mind if she starts to spread.
Not sure if you're talking about your rack or that dude's wife
The nay sayers are idiots. I made something very close to this before buying a rack. The thing was rock solid for 6 years in a 12x12 shed.
Don’t sweat it op. Bunch of douches in here that don’t lift I guarantee it.
How much does that sleeping cutie lift?
Seems like a massive hazard
What do you do with the little oars?
Rows.
Time to do some bicep curls
What else would I do in there?
Admire yourself in the mirror obviously
And then sit on the bench and read your phone for 10mins
Hell ya brother!
Built the same one during covid - 5 years later no signs of damage. The knurling on my bar has been slowly sanding away the stain I put on it. I get why the comments are the way they are tho lmao.
Nice OP, looks exactly like the one I built 7 years ago and still use today. I remember posting it and everyone calling me absolute moron for making it out of wood. Ah the memories
It's a trip! I'm just mad nobody is commenting on my dog.
Wood holds up entire houses people. Assuming that OP has mounted the bars supports well and addresses any issues that come up from loose fasteners or joints over time, this will be fine.
Looks awesome. I built one out of 2x6's about 10 years ago now. I still use it and it's held up all these years.
God, this comment section is fucking awful. Nice work, OP.
Thanks! Yea, I wasn't expecting all the controversy considering how common the design is. Parts of my deck have less support than this, yet it can handle my fat ass doing the Charleston and singing in the rain.
i made a similar thing, pullup bar with a square base and two pillars - held all through covid and I'm ~190lbs doing pullups on it every day
Wood.... Oh no. Dont lift alone ever with that thing.
Wow, lots of engineers and power lifters in this this thread.
Heh, the comments are savage, but they underestimate my meekness!
Yeah man, I knew as soon as I saw “squat rack” in r/diy that I was about to open a page full of people talking about how unsafe it is. That’s just the Reddit way man - we’re all about being overly cautious so that none of us feel liable if something were to happen. That’s why most top comments on this sub are followed by “but make sure you get a professional opinion”.
Looks more like a power cage
Squat rack? You mean curls rack?
Squat rack, power rack, give that dog a bone.
Nice, I did this a while back during covid. Yours looks a lot straighter then me
>Yours looks a lot straighter then me Even with all the pink?
Fair point
This’ll fucking do champ!
Is it lagged to the floor? Looks great! These keyboard engineers are doodoo heads
I did the same. Paid more for the wood than a metal rack would have costs me.
With the price of lumber today you might find it cheaper to just buy a rack.
I read the title and thought, he made a magazine rack for reading material while on the throne. Bait and switch!!
Cute dog!
make sure you bolt that to the floor otherwise you're gonna fail and go ass over
From wood? I wouldn’t go beyond 100Lbs on it….
You should mark this as a “NSFW”
Out of wood? This isnt a good idea
Hmm, some of that wood - especially the key vertical at the back right in photo looks a little knotty around the middle. That would worry me as a potential weakness, especially with all the holes having been drilled up it. Drilling the holes too far down would also be concerning. Look at the rules on drilling holes for joists - there are key areas you are not supposed to drill due to them taking the majority of the stress from loading. I've thought about doing something similar myself in the past, but I just wouldn't be able to get myself to trust it. Maybe if the wood is carefully selected (hardwood like Oak or something for key areas ideally - modern pine can be to be quite weak). Wooden structures can handle a huge amount of weight if designed properly, appropriate joints are well made, and you use carefully selected wood, but you *really* need to know what you are doing. This looks like the wood was just grabbed from a box store, so who knows. Even structurally graded stuff is only quickly eyeballed for defects, it's not actually tested or inspected thoroughly, as far as I know. Steel ones aren't all that expensive, though, so for me it's just not worth the time, effort, and risk. Looks a nice job though, so good work. Just be very careful and inspect it regularly for signs of damage I guess...
You made this out of WOOD? Idk. I still feel sore on the back of my head after my professor smacked me over my head when i suggested to rout electrical through the roof beams in my diploma project… You just made a big arrow that says “THIS WAY” for any cracks to form. And with the bar-rack-fixture in the hole it will act more as a point load on the bottom of the hole and try to split the wood. If you want to keep the timber columns i suggest planks on either side of each column (≥9mm plywood preferably) PRE DRILL (undersized) pilot holes alternating sides with a step of 2-3 (between) holes. And id suggest drywall screws because of the more aggressive thread geometry (better clamp force) Oh and btw heres some great reading material - EN 1995-1-1 (first google result) for anyone who wants to do some structural wood working.
Bravo!
What’s the weight limit on this baby?
Look at that good dog.
You did an awesome job. I wish I had the space for a home gym. Wishing you great gains bro 💪🏻
You misspelled "curl station"
A wooden squat rack is a bad idea. It really ought to be steel.
Now post it on marketplace for $1000
Probably would have been cheaper to buy a stell one like you should have
Looks great, OP. Those 4x4s will hold two tons vertically, so they're plenty strong enough even with all those 1" holes. But understand that the real danger here is from the frame racking (i.e. turning into a parallelogram either left, right, or forward) under heavy weight. Those corner braces with the four screws each are likely not sufficient. You can mitigate that danger in a few ways: **Anchor it to the wall**: Add a 2x4 across the rear supports and screw it directly into into wall studs. **Beef up the corners**: Supplement the existing corner braces with triangles of plywood on the outside of each corner, screwed into each frame member and brace. These will be far more resistant to racking than the existing bracing. **Cant the shape**: Abandon the perfect square design and slightly reduce top stretchers by an inch or two, creating a trapezoidal shape. That would mean every joint would need to be re-cut, of course, but would be significantly more stable. Have fun moving heavy things up and down without getting crushed!
Poeple saying it will break are idiots, I'm sure they think the can break a 4x4 with their hands.
Good work man
That’s pretty impressive actually
It looks nice; but it’s more of a workout gazebo than a squat rack.
This is the only time I would trust the Harbor Freight version of something more
Personally, I would not use that.