Low Tech Weightlifting Rack

I'm pretty lucky.  I've had a 300 pound set of weights in storage for about 20 years now, so when I finally got around to focus on lifting heavy sh!t I already had a key part of the home gym waiting to be used.  I live in an old house and the basement is really more of a crawl space so finding a place that I could use the weights was going to be a challenge.  Really, the only place that had potential was in the garage but I didn't want to give up any workshop or parking space to weight lifting.

After some head scratching and time walking around the garage looking like I was lost, I settled on a spot near the door going into the house.  The spot had been a catchall area for shoes and such so the challenge would be to see if I could build something out of wood that would fit in a 24" x 48" area.  I drew some inspiration from folding racks like the ETHOS Folding Wall Rack but with nothing like it in stock anywhere at the time, I was going to have to build my own.  Also, I have a window to work around and all of the folding racks were going to want to spoil my view with a support that would be at eye level in front of the window.

Approximate amount of floor   
space to work with

I spent way too much time overthinking what the construction material would be and then settled on wood.  It seems weird to see a bunch of cast iron plates on a bar sitting on wood.  Was it really going to be that easy?  Some searching online for other people that have homemade racks out of wood helped gave me confidence that this would work out.  Also, have you ever seen the DOT working on a bridge on the highway?  Have you ever noticed what they use for temporary supports?  Wood.  If a bunch of wood cribbing can hold up a bridge then I am pretty sure it will work out ok for this swim/bike/run athlete trying to move heavy sh!t.  (Un?)Fortunately, none of the plans that I found fit exactly what I was trying to do.  I'm not very good at following instructions and at the end of the day I'd rather make it all up from scratch.  The unique challenge of trying to squeeze the rack into the smallest amount of space possible was the only excuse I needed to design my own.

The idea was that I'd build two 'U' shaped structures to tie the rack to the wall.  Essentially, this is the standoff between where the bar sits and the wall.  This was very similar to the Ethos wall rack except that I would dimension mine so that they were placed above/below the window that I'd be surrounding with this contraption.  This pair of giant brackets then just needs to have some uprights attached to it of various heights to give me a place to set the bar at squat height and also at bench press height.

The uprights that would hold the bar were 4x4 posts with the top cut at a 10 degree angle so that the bar would want to naturally roll to the back.  The rest of the rack was built out of 2x4's except where it became convenient to use leftover scrap 4x4's

No laughing.  😆

The ceiling in the garage is 8 1/2 feet tall and I couldn't find 4x4's tall enough without going with pressure treated lumber so I just used two 2x4's screwed together for the floor-to-ceiling backstop that would prevent me from missing when I was putting the bar onto the rack at the highest/squat position.  The advantage of taking the entire thing to the ceiling was that I could then use long screws to attach the top to the ceiling which made the entire structure even more stiff.  I originally thought I'd need a seperate weight tree to store the cast iron plates but then found that I could store all of the biggest plates on the rack using 3 1/2" galvanized pipe with a cap attached to a flange that is screwed into the wood.  The cap might not be necessary, but that extra little lip stops the plates from sliding off when you don't want them to.

Lessons Learned

If you read this far you probably are interested to know what I screwed up :-)

• Don't trust your measurements for the 4x4 posts that the bar will sit on.  If you do trust the measurements, then don't trust the floor.  I found that everything on one side was off by a bit when I was looking at it and noticed that the bar was not level when compared to the window.  Sure enough, when I put a level across the rack I had messed up one side.  I wish I'd thought to bring the level out before attaching everything with screws.
• Do you need a mirror?  How are you going to know that you are doing the exercise right if you can't see yourself?  The reflection in the window when it is dark outside helped some for this, but even in Rochester it isn't always dark outside.  I wound up solving this problem with the most over engineered solution ever, but that will be its own post soon enough.
• Be careful about where you decide to place the galvanized posts to hold the weights.  I figured it would be easiest if the heaviest weights were at the top so that I didn't have to bend over to get them on/off.  That was a good idea, but the way that I executed it meant that when I was bench pressing if I got off center a little bit then I would sometimes hit weights that were being stored with the bar I was moving.
• Everything works well until your wife decides that she would like to try doing the same thing and she's a foot shorter than you are.  The solution?  Make it adjustable.  I added plywood cleats so that blocks could safely be added for her to have a custom squat rack height.  It's simply an additional piece of 4x4 cut at a 10 degree angle top and bottom with plywood attached to the side.  The plywood is sized to cover all of the seams and wraps around the cleat that is permanently attached to the rack.