I gave it quite a lot of thought and did some research into how other people have made them.  Adam T Glass has made one for less than $10 using a steel fence post.  I looked into using this method but I couldn’t find the right sort of fence post here in the UK.

So I consulted the oracle of homemade gym equipment, Pat Hodgson, at Homemade Gym Stuff.  He advised me that PVC pipe was adequate for the job so I set to and built one.  And I have to say, I am very happy with it.

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What you need

As you can see in the picture below, you don’t need much.  Just a piece of PVC pipe, an old straight bar and some pipe cladding.  You’ll also want a hacksaw for cutting the PVC tube to the correct length and some scissors to cut the cladding to the right length.

The PVC pipe I used was actually 60mm diameter (2.36 inches) drainpipe.  That’s a (claimed) 60mm (2.36 inches) diameter bore but it’s getting on for 70mm (2.75 inches) from outer edge to outer edge.

I had been intending to use waste pipe but the largest diameter I could find was just 50mm (1.96 inches), which isn’t a lot fatter than my Olympic bar, really.  I didn’t want to be using the bar for deadlifts with tons of weight on the bar.  Also, this drainpipe was made of quite thick plastic and was almost as tough as the pieces of waste pipe I had previously seen.

The cladding I used was large bore.  You can see this in the picture below.  The large bore makes it easier to get your olympic bar into the cladding without making the whole thing a lot bigger and therefore harder to get inside the drainpipe (and believe me it was hard enough!).

First, clad your bar

The first thing I did was to add the pipe cladding to the bar.  This involved cutting off any of the cladding that I didn’t need.  I made sure that the cladding was just short of the weights plates at each end.

Then attach the cladding tightly

I then used some electrical tape to wrap the cladding as tightly as possible around the bar.  This makes sure that the cladding is not going to move very much when you try and slide the drainpipe over it but also reduces the diameter of the clad bar, which you will appreciate if your drainpipe was as tight a fit as mine!

Next, measure and cut the drainpipe

Having worked out how long the cladding was going to be, I then measured the drainpipe next to it and cut the drainpipe to the same length as the cladding using the hacksaw.

Now, slide the drainpipe over the cladding

Then, I upended the clad bar and slid (stuffed, cursed, swore and pushed until I turned red) the drainpipe over the top.  Once I had managed to get the drainpipe over the bar, it felt fairly sturdy.  This was because I chose cladding that was pretty much the same diameter as the drainpipe bore.  I don’t have any pictures of this stage as I was too busy cursing about how annoying homemade gym equipment is.

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Finished! Now you can grip and rip

You’re done!  Put your weight plates on the end and Robert is your mother’s brother.  The cladding makes sure that the drainpipe doesn’t move when you pick the bar up.

If you have another method for making a fat bar, I’d be really interested to hear about it.