It’s already been more than 6 months of Lock down and this Corona Virus Pandemic is looking far from over. What looked to be a memorable time of everyone’s life where everyone would cook great meals, follow different challenges, motivate each other or start their side hustle (if possible) are really getting bored and starting to get frustrated from it. Me being a normal human ( Which I doubt sometime, but deep inside I know I am) am also getting too tired of it now. I am really missing something that I could do and getting too tired of trying to be “super-productive” everyday. Few days back I realized how less I’ve been exercising as I have been inside my home for too long. Only exercise I had was a small Hike to Maligaau with Abhijhan when there was a small window of all these lockdown and bans lifted up. Thank god I did it at least. Obviously, that one day hike isn’t gonna make me fit. So I decided to start exercising and It didn’t take me long to realize how badly I was lacking equipment as I was used to using Barbells and Dumbbells from Gym when I used to go there as a part of my new year resolution every week a year :P. So let’s buy the Dumbbells…… No chance….. As I am extremely frugal, I decided to take the matter in my own hands and build my own Dumbbells using my little knowledge in Civil Engineering. So i just started my “project Dumbbell” and started building it. Let’s get back into what I did:
Just like any other project, I had to plan it,come with Ideas and execute it. So for that I hired an Engineer for planning & supervision and a guy with some experience of building things. Luckily, the same guy with planning & supervision skill had skill of building things too and the guy was Rashik Raj koirala. Enough of Self adulation now let’s get straight to the process.
THE PROCESS
Materials
I just got to a local hardware shop and bought the following items:
1) 0.75 inch thick PPR Pipe
2) Galvanized Iron Nails
3) 2 Kg Cement
Procedure:
I nailed the nails on the Pipe so that the dumbbells would have something to grip into and then concrete the sides of the pipe. For giving Concrete a shape, formworks was needed.So, I cut the water bottle and got circular rings from it that worked very nicely as a formwork. For preparing concrete I used cement and sand in ratio 1:2. Very small aggregates were used that were already present in the sand. Then all I had to do was pour the concrete inside formworks and wait for the time to do its work. After it was set a little bit, all i had to do was some curing ( pouring water to it time by time) and after some time I dipped it into a bucket of water for few days to prevent carbonation of concrete and tadaa … dumbbells were ready to use.
Usability:
The use of 0.75 inch pipe proved to be best as dumbbells could be used with very much ease. Only thing that felt less was weight as one dumbbell weighed only about 5kg which feels less after some days of being used to and building a dumbbell of about 8kg would take huge volume of concrete making its dimensions big and shifting the CG more towards the outwards side making it difficult to balance. Nonetheless, it was a very much fun project altogether.