Well, as long as I’m letting everyone know how I cobble together my own equipment, I’ll let yall in on how I made my own dip/chinning weight belt, with pictures to follow if there is interest.
For any of you that grew up making rope halters on the farm, this will be easy. You need to be able to braid the rope into itself as in a halter to make this work properly, I just don’t think knots will work. Also, as with any advice I give about making things that put your body under load, be careful. Don’t try to make this, screw it up, drop the weight on yourself and be pissed at me.
First, get a rope. Duh! Try to get about a one inch manilla rope, but you can use smaller if you have to. It has to be twisted manilla! The nylon stuff will not work! It needs to be the size of your waist plus a few feet. For me, with about a three foot waist, I used a five foot rope, but wish I’d used six.
Make a loop in one end of the rope just big enough to slip the other end in. Do this by looping one end around the other end, and twisting the three strands of rope apart, and jamming the loose end of the loop end into one of the strands. Then skip a strand and shove it in again. You’ll want to use enough rope for the loop to be able to do this two if not three times, i.e. you poke the end in between the strands two if not three times. This isn’t that complicated, just be patient and it will come.
So now you should have a big loop of rope. Actually, a rope looped into itself like a lariat. You can do basically whatever you want with the other end to attach weight to it, but heres what I did:
Go to the hardware store and get at least an inch and a half metal ring. A two incher wouldn’t hurt. I know Lowe’s has these cause thats where I got mine. This needs to be looped into the rope the same way as the first loop, by braiding the rope into itself. Then from that ring you can hang a chain with a gated link and a snap ring or simple s hook. If you make the rope too long, you’ll probably want to use less chain. If you make it kinda short like I did on mine, use a long chain.
I have a pretty skinny rope on mine, and my rope was too short to let me intertwine the braids as many times as I would have liked, but my belt will still hold 75 pounds pretty safely. If you’re going to use some sort of huge scary poundage, first my hats off to ya, and secondly consider buying a real belt or just be very, very careful when you make this one!
The first few times you use it, and especially when you use heavy weight, watch the braids to make sure the rope isn’t pulling out. It’s kind of a bitch to pull apart and redo, so get a little more rope than you need, and make the braids longer than you think you need.
If there’s any questions, or more importantly any interest, I’ll post a picture of the end product…
