After seeing how much it would cost to buy the 25lb and 45lb weight plates for my home gym during the pandemic, I decided to look into ways to make my own. I settled on using concrete molds from the website Stix and Stone. It seemed simple enough- just buy the molds, buy some concrete, mix the concrete with water, put the mix in the mold, wait a couple days, and voila, you’ve got yourself a barbell plate at a fraction of the cost. As it turns out, this plan was not as straightforward as it first appeared.
The main problem is my inexperience with concrete- this is my first time ever mixing or pouring it. I did not understand going in that this would require a level of finesse akin to a baker adding just the right amount of ingredients to make the perfect loaf of bread. For the first two batches of weights, I eyeballed the amount of water, and (though I obviously didn’t realize it at the time) ended up using way too much. I have just read that adding more water means that your concrete will shrink more during the curing process, which makes it much more likely to crack. That explains why my first couple of batches are so prone to crumbling when I touch them.
I also didn’t realize how long this whole process would be. I understood it would take a while for the weights to reach full strength (concrete takes about a week to get to 50% strength, and a month to get to 99% strength, according to Stix and Stone), but I didn’t realize they’d still be so weak and crumble-y when I removed them from the molds. The darker gray weights you see that have just been removed from the mold have more of a clay texture than an actual hardened concrete texture, and handling them without breaking them is nigh impossible. I am not sure how much of that is normal, and how much is because I put way too much water in my concrete mix.
Overall, I am a little frustrated that the weights are taking so long to cure and that they seem so crumbly and fragile- I thought I’d have what I needed to get started lifting again in a week, but clearly, that’s not going to happen. However, I know I will continue to improve my mixing and pouring technique over the next few batches, so I think everything will turn out okay- it’s just a matter of patience, at this point. Who knew that this would be so tricky?
Ethan Powers' Blog 