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Olympic bar/weight hole diameters

jj80

jj80

Member
With your normal 'small hole' weights from elite fitness/rebel sport etc, I found it's possible to get different hole diameters and especially different bar diameters. I have one 7 foot bar at the moment gathering rust cause it's 26mm or so and all my weights are 25mm.

I'm after some olympic weights at the moment and looking to buy second hand. Do I have to be careful for the same thing?

I've read olympic bars are all 1 inch, does that mean the weights are all 50.8mm? Should I therefore avoid 50mm weights? Don't want to buy a set of second hand weights then an ABC 50.8mm bar and find I've just blown $600 on a bar that won't be useful.
 
Get the weights to suit the bar. All standard bars are same diameter, 50 point something. Any that are less are rubbish you shouldnt have anyways.
 
With a cheap oly bar you should be fine with all oly plates except sometimes competition plates which are made to finer tolerances than the cheap bars but you shouldn't have to worry about that.
 
If your plates are cheap they'll likely have a 51 or 52mm opening
Abc bar has a 50mm sleeve, expensive plates will be in the 50.2 to 50.8mm range and may not fit on a china bar (you can always file down bar/plates if need be though
 
The Hamburgler said:
If your plates are cheap they'll likely have a 51 or 52mm opening
Abc bar has a 50mm sleeve, expensive plates will be in the 50.2 to 50.8mm range and may not fit on a china bar (you can always file down bar/plates if need be though
Click to expand...

I want to see someone file an eleiko plate down to fit on a cheap china bar. Lol.
 
Lol Minh would have a heart attack

The guys at Ron Birch's gym in Ballina apparently had to do this for an OPO comp as the plates wouldn't fit on their Mastodon bar
 
Thanks! Now I just have to resist the temptation of buying 4 x red 25kg bumper plates so I can pretend the olympics is occurring in my basement when I lift :P

BTW any suggestions for micro home made calibration weights, and where to get some accurate scales? All my weights are like +/- 0.1kg to 1kg (yeah, I got a 21kg plate :/)
 
As in how to make up like a 500g plate?
Got to Bunnings an buy a bagful of washers with a 50mm+ opening, some metal glue then put together what weights you want
 
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