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Shops that can make Olympic bars in the USA?

ryanjm

Plastic
Joined
Jan 18, 2013
Location
Denver, CO
Hi guys, I'm not sure if this is the right place for this so please forgive me if this isn't it, but I own a fitness equipment company here in Colorado and I'm looking to find a shop that is capable of making Olympic bars. I've been able to find sources overseas pretty easily, but no luck finding local sources yet. I would ideally be looking for a place that has experience with this since there is a good amount of technical expertise required for a high quality Olympic bar. Things we are looking for:

165k PSI minimum tensile/yield strength
Bright zinc coating
Bushings in the bar sleeves

Under $170/bar cost assuming MOQ of 50 bars.

Any help finding a source for this is appreciated.

-Ryan
 
You say you are looking for technical expertise---to make olympic bars. Welcome to the "Gold Metal Platforum." Probably no less than 500 members could make the bars or bars that exceed all specifications. Not to say they will but "capable"---yes. I hope someone on here makes them for you as I would be interested in your response to their quality. Good luck with your fitness equipment company.
 
Last time I touched any bars, they weigh 45lbs each. The bar referenced above is 52lb, I'm thinking you'll have a hard time getting such a device made for $170, given the 165ksi requirement. The company above sells them for $580, which tells me the market will pay $580. Your cost is going to depend on this number, the PITA factor, raw materials, plating, and machining cost.
 
You ever looked at ironmind.

http://www.ironmind.com/

They have some nice stuff. The captains of crush grippers are bad@ss.
Yeah I've got some of their grippers and I agree. I'm not sure if they are what I need though because they are a fitness company themselves and sell their own equipment. I'm looking more for a "behind the scenes" shop that will allow me to brand the bars as my own.

You say you are looking for technical expertise---to make olympic bars. Welcome to the "Gold Metal Platforum." Probably no less than 500 members could make the bars or bars that exceed all specifications. Not to say they will but "capable"---yes. I hope someone on here makes them for you as I would be interested in your response to their quality. Good luck with your fitness equipment company.
That's interesting. I didn't realize this would be such a simple task for many. I've heard that the bushings and collar area is tricky to get right, as well as the right alloy to allow for a bit of whip, yet not easily bend. I hope you are right and that someone is up to the task.

Forgive my ignance, but are you talking about bars for weight lifting, or for gymnastics?


Rex
Weight lifting.
 
Last time I touched any bars, they weigh 45lbs each. The bar referenced above is 52lb, I'm thinking you'll have a hard time getting such a device made for $170, given the 165ksi requirement. The company above sells them for $580, which tells me the market will pay $580. Your cost is going to depend on this number, the PITA factor, raw materials, plating, and machining cost.

Just saw your post-- There is a wide variation in price, but I can assure you that there are companies out there getting these bars for the price I mentioned. I don't want to link to them because they are competitors and every link helps with ranking, but companies such as: Fringesport, Rogue Fitness, and Again Faster all have bars that meet this specification, and they retail from $200-270, which tells me they are likely getting them for even cheaper than the price I quoted, but I assume their order quantities are much higher since they've been around for a while. All 20kg bars for Olympic spec.
 
165k PSI minimum tensile/yield strength

Which is it, tensile or yield? They are not the same, and not interchangeable.

Now for the difficult part. Ryan hasn't specified the knurling. The sharpness of the knurling is what sets the high quality bars apart from the others. A material like ETD 150, which won't meet the 165 yield, is a real bitch to knurl to closed peaks, with a coarse knurl as well.

I suspect the good bars are heat treated after knurling.

On edit: The bars are about 7'3 long, so if you buy regular cold finished stock in 12' lengths, you get 1 bar per with a huge drop. Here in the US, material would be 1 1/8 diameter. Regulation stuff is 28mm.
 
An Olympic bar is one that is cetified for use in Olympic Lifting meets, for doing Snatchs and Clean &Jerks, and have bearings that can take impact from being dropped to the ground . Not the equipment your average weekend warrior doing benchpress will purchase. But if your doing Olympic lifts or Crossfit style workouts, they are worth the extra money. Ive seen a cheap import bar, not heat treated, bend permenantly from only 400lbs.

CHeck out Rouge Fitness bars, they are about the nicest I have used, good knurl, and more importantly, a good bearing.
 
moonlight - it is the kind of weighlifting bar with the fat ends that accepts the "olympic plates" rather than the more common home style bar and plates that are just 1" dia. I am sure gbent is correct in that these bars will need to be heat treated. To do all that work for $170 is a pipe dream unless the volume is up around 10,000 pieces. For 50 pieces your looking at about $500 per piece. It's a tough market to break into.

I have people regularly stopping into my shop with pipe dreams. They're into RC cars or road racing or building custom motorcycles and they think they should be able to get 2 gears cut for for their rc car for $15 (total) or a head decked for their mazda miata for $20 with me taking all the responsibility for figuring out valve clearances or head brackets 3-d'd for $18 because there's no way they're going to pay the guy on ebay $75 for a
"$5" piece of aluminum.

ryanjm - since you're new to the forum let me give you a reality check - to do the macining necessary to make an olympic bar you're looking at about two hours once the job is programmed and setup. You have about 2 hours set up time on that job and about 1 hour programming time. Then you have a 2 hour cycle time per piece x $75 per hour. That doesn't include material, heat treating or metallurgical analysis (which you're definitely going to need to avoid lawsuits). Now you do the math and figure out if you REALLY think that $170 per piece is realistic anywhere other than a third world country.
 
Which is it, tensile or yield? They are not the same, and not interchangeable.

Now for the difficult part. Ryan hasn't specified the knurling. The sharpness of the knurling is what sets the high quality bars apart from the others. A material like ETD 150, which won't meet the 165 yield, is a real bitch to knurl to closed peaks, with a coarse knurl as well.

I suspect the good bars are heat treated after knurling.

On edit: The bars are about 7'3 long, so if you buy regular cold finished stock in 12' lengths, you get 1 bar per with a huge drop. Here in the US, material would be 1 1/8 diameter. Regulation stuff is 28mm.

Both tensile and yield need to be a minimum of 165k. The sharpness of the knurl is more of a personal preference and dependent on what it's used for, not an indication of the quality of the bar. For example, if you are doing power lifting with heavy deadlifts, you would want a very aggressive knurl so that you don't lose your grip. But if you're doing Olympic lifts, you need the bar to be able to spin in your hand without tearing it to pieces, so a nice medium knurl is plenty. The preciseness and uniformity of the knurl is what sets most bars apart. Also, yes, 28mm or 28.5mm is what is needed.

An Olympic bar is one that is cetified for use in Olympic Lifting meets, for doing Snatchs and Clean &Jerks, and have bearings that can take impact from being dropped to the ground . Not the equipment your average weekend warrior doing benchpress will purchase. But if your doing Olympic lifts or Crossfit style workouts, they are worth the extra money. Ive seen a cheap import bar, not heat treated, bend permenantly from only 400lbs.

CHeck out Rouge Fitness bars, they are about the nicest I have used, good knurl, and more importantly, a good bearing.

Yes, the Rogue bars are nice and are a competitor. Notice they are 165k rated, made in the USA, and sell for $270. You can actually find very high quality import bars, it's just that not many companies sell them since the cheaper low quality ones are easier to sell to the masses that don't want to pay over $150-200. They bend because the have very low yield strength numbers from low quality steel.

moonlight - it is the kind of weighlifting bar with the fat ends that accepts the "olympic plates" rather than the more common home style bar and plates that are just 1" dia. I am sure gbent is correct in that these bars will need to be heat treated. To do all that work for $170 is a pipe dream unless the volume is up around 10,000 pieces. For 50 pieces your looking at about $500 per piece. It's a tough market to break into.

I have people regularly stopping into my shop with pipe dreams. They're into RC cars or road racing or building custom motorcycles and they think they should be able to get 2 gears cut for for their rc car for $15 (total) or a head decked for their mazda miata for $20 with me taking all the responsibility for figuring out valve clearances or head brackets 3-d'd for $18 because there's no way they're going to pay the guy on ebay $75 for a
"$5" piece of aluminum.

ryanjm - since you're new to the forum let me give you a reality check - to do the macining necessary to make an olympic bar you're looking at about two hours once the job is programmed and setup. You have about 2 hours set up time on that job and about 1 hour programming time. Then you have a 2 hour cycle time per piece x $75 per hour. That doesn't include material, heat treating or metallurgical analysis (which you're definitely going to need to avoid lawsuits). Now you do the math and figure out if you REALLY think that $170 per piece is realistic anywhere other than a third world country.

Hi Joe, the companies I quoted in an earlier post all sell bars that are made in the USA with the requirements I posted, and all retail for $200-270. I can guarantee you they are not selling those bars for a loss, and that they also do not have 10,000 pieces ordered at a time. I guess this is part of the reason why I was looking for a shop that is experienced in this and/or knows how to make the bar required without doing a lot of prep work, because they would already know how to make one for the price I quoted.

You are correct though that I have already gotten prices for $150-160/bar from overseas, and that's for an even higher quality bar than what I'm looking for here in the U.S. They already make bars that aren't widely available here, with 210k tensile, 200k yield and a proprietary bushing design. It's an awesome bar and we'd be proud to sell it since other companies here with those numbers charge $500+ for a bar like that, but I really wanted to stay in the U.S. if I could find a supplier similar to one of the companies my competitors are using here in the U.S. I just haven't figured out where they are getting their bars, or how they manage to find a supplier that is capable of producing them at the costs I mentioned.
 
the companies I quoted in an earlier post all sell bars that are made in the USA with the requirements I posted, and all retail for $200-270. I can guarantee you they are not selling those bars for a loss, and that they also do not have 10,000 pieces ordered at a time. I guess this is part of the reason why I was looking for a shop that is experienced in this and/or knows how to make the bar required without doing a lot of prep work, because they would already know how to make one for the price I quoted.

You are correct though that I have already gotten prices for $150-160/bar from overseas, and that's for an even higher quality bar than what I'm looking for here in the U.S. They already make bars that aren't widely available here, with 210k tensile, 200k yield and a proprietary bushing design.

"Higher quality" shouldn't be confused with "higher tensile and yield strength". Taking a bar of 4140 annealed steel (100ksi) and heat treating it to 150ksi costs the same as treating it to 200ksi. It's just a difference in tempering procedure. There are many other factors that determine the overall quality - the raw material source, handling, machining, heat treatment, plating, etc. It's not a simple numbers game.

In addition, higher strength comes with higher hardness and increased brittleness. Bent bars are safer than cracked/broken bars, so higher does not necessarily equal better.

Have you performed any tests on your competitors' products to verify the strength and material?

-Sol
 
^It was my understanding that tensile strength refers to the amount of pressure before the bar will break, while yield strength refers to the ability of the bar to "snap back into shape" and resist being bent permanently. A high yield and tensile would mean the bar won't bend permanently or break easily. Is that wrong? I feel that it does generally equate to higher quality because the best bars from Eleiko and Werksan (both considered high-end Olympic equipment companies) are rated over 200k. Crappy bars are usually in the 80-100k range, and good quality ones are in the 150-170k range. Of course, the knurl, coating, and bushings all need to be excellent as well, but the most obvious variable is the quality of the steel used, and its ability to resist being permanently bent when lifting a heavy load, or dropping a bar loaded with bumper plates.

I'm actually waiting on samples to be delivered now from that company overseas to verify what they claim. I've tested one competitor's bar that we currently sell (since we don't have our own yet) and it was able to handle a static load of 750 lbs without being permanently bent, as well as a dynamic test of being loaded with 250 lbs of bumper plates being dropped from a height of approx 5 feet and no damage there either. Not exactly an engineering grade test, but then again it was mainly for the purposes of demonstrating to a potential buyer that the bar is solid, and none of our competitors even do videos like that.
 
"Higher quality" shouldn't be confused with "higher tensile and yield strength". Taking a bar of 4140 annealed steel (100ksi) and heat treating it to 150ksi costs the same as treating it to 200ksi. It's just a difference in tempering procedure. There are many other factors that determine the overall quality - the raw material source, handling, machining, heat treatment, plating, etc. It's not a simple numbers game.

In addition, higher strength comes with higher hardness and increased brittleness. Bent bars are safer than cracked/broken bars, so higher does not necessarily equal better.

Have you performed any tests on your competitors' products to verify the strength and material?

-Sol

That's funny, because I seem to recall 4140 doesn't have enough carbon to HT to 200ksi: MatWeb - The Online Materials Information Resource
 
Seems to me like the coating/plating is probably more important than the steel. The bar I have is residential grade (not Olympic) and i've had it since high school. Sweaty palms can make these things rust in a hurry as can basements with higher humidity levels. Also the coating needs to flex with the bar and not crack or flake off....which is probably related to the quality of coating/plating prep. It might be advisable to try some kind of a salt spray test to assess the coating...

I think I'm going to do some bodyguard interviews. Any person who can manually fail to fracture a 25mm or 1" round bar of annealed 4140 gets the job :D
 
Ryan,

The part you probably aren't grasping, all of the companies you want to compete with have figured out not just physical dimensions and materials specs, but also process. You are starting off with nothing more than a spec sheet and asking for someone to design a process for you, and do it in pilot quantities, with them taking all the risk and doing all the R&D.

You are getting this feedback because machinists will not invest time in developing a process unless there is significant long term value, so what you are getting quoted is Time and Materials for the task at hand. They are quoting you for the bar end waste, the setup, and production of parts that will exactly meet your specification. You haven't determined a design for the bearings, you haven't worked out the tolerances, you haven't specified the knurl, and you haven't nailed down a material.

You are asking for product design and process design, which is an R&D investment. This is why companies buy offshore, because they will sell you "real good bar" that they've reverse engineered, cheapened, and increased the tolerances on.
 
Ryan,

The part you probably aren't grasping, all of the companies you want to compete with have figured out not just physical dimensions and materials specs, but also process. You are starting off with nothing more than a spec sheet and asking for someone to design a process for you, and do it in pilot quantities, with them taking all the risk and doing all the R&D.

You are getting this feedback because machinists will not invest time in developing a process unless there is significant long term value, so what you are getting quoted is Time and Materials for the task at hand. They are quoting you for the bar end waste, the setup, and production of parts that will exactly meet your specification. You haven't determined a design for the bearings, you haven't worked out the tolerances, you haven't specified the knurl, and you haven't nailed down a material.

You are asking for product design and process design, which is an R&D investment. This is why companies buy offshore, because they will sell you "real good bar" that they've reverse engineered, cheapened, and increased the tolerances on.

I agree with you here. I need a shop that has already made these, or is already making these and selling them to other companies or in small quantities on their own. Of course, I'm looking for a continuing business relationship beyond the initial 50 bars. I know that the companies I'm competing with did not design their bars from scratch, they simply found a shop that already knows how to make these or is already producing them, and just buy them and brand them as their own. I guess that's what I'm trying to find since it's clearly too much prep/design work to do this with a shop that doesn't have experience in this and/or already make bars.
 








 
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