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From scrapyard to weight plate

2 September 2023
Adarsh Gopal

Here’s the story of the unusually sized weight plates in our gym. They have a 2 inch hole in the middle. Usually anything over 10 kgs is 450 mm (just under 18 inches) in diameter.

We needed smaller diameter plates that weigh just as much. We have clients deadlifting and squatting 50-120 kgs on unconventional implements such as t-bells, adjustable dumbbells, centre mass bells and belt squat machines. So we need plates to fit this need.

What we did: I visited the local scrap yard. I found flanges lined up for recycling. Terrific 316 and 304 stainless steel flanges. One we found is 11 inches in diameter and 1.5 inches thick. It weighs 17.5 kgs.

A flange is a disc with a hole in the middle and several dotted around. They’re used by industries for a bunch of things.

Enter us. We take these discarded flanges. We alter the centre hole and up-cycle it into weight plates for our gym.

The advantages:

  1. No paint to chip, peel or rust. The plate ages gracefully with zero maintenance.
  2. Flanges come in all sizes. We find the sizes that work for us and put it to use.
  3. Weight plates made of cast iron or rubber cost 250-300 bucks a kg. Stainless steel flanges cost around the same amount. And they’re hardier and come in sizes that we need.

We still need and use rubber bumper plates. But metal plates are versatile, affordable and fill our unique requirement. We’ve come to love flanges so much, we even had a factory cast a few for us when we needed something unusual for our dumbbells. All this 5 kms from our gym. God bless terrible urban planning and Madras’ amazing industrial setting.

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