Pullup Bar

In order to do more workouts at home, I decided to put a chin-up bar in my basement. I looked around at amazon and saw three real options: over the door mount, on the ceiling mount or wall mount. Three examples shown below:

In a pull-up bar, I value stability. When exercising, I don’t want a single thought that I am moving anything other than myself. The door mount would sway and not have the solid feel I want. The wall mount is best, but I don’t have room for it and I want Chrissy to be able to use a chair at an arbitrary distance in front of her to assist. The ceiling mounted unit was best, but I didn’t want to wait several weeks and pay that much cash. So I designed by own using $12 in parts from home depot which included 36″ long piece of 1-inch diameter threaded steel pipe. I also purchased two threaded endcaps to hold in the bar and six bolts to hold in the assembly. Using SketchUp, you can see the design below. Whole design, buy, construct and build will take ~4 hours, so no money gained, but I have fun building this stuff.

I was inspired by http://www.angelfire.com/ny5/shenandoah/Grunt/Bodyweight.html and the basic design of:

,

but I wanted something more secure, hence my end-caps and rabbet with kreg inset screws which resulted in the following part (x2):

This enabled an extremely strong connection to the joist, and provided me with 11.5 inches above the bar of clearance plus however much the inner joist I am willing to put my head in. We will see how this goes and I will post a final product.

Some pictures of the final product:

One thing I didn’t do was a finite element model of the stress using AutoDesk Inventor. I started down this path — mostly out of a desire to refresh my FEA skills, but I realized that I didn’t have time to study the mesh and learn this new app. Definitely would love to add this tool to the toolbox since Inventor has a great rendering engine. Funny that I have never really used all my structures classes which is something I would like to rectify.