It's hard to say of this is more funny or annoying. It's both, though.

[xiphias]

So, Brian, the trainer I work with at the gym, has been wanting to get 65 pound dumbbells for a while now. And I'm the excuse he got to finally do so. (And, well, he paid for them himself out of his bonus check. . . )

They finally arrived, on the day when I was going to be doing dumbbell presses anyway, so I got to be the first person to use them, even before Brian got to try them out. So we started doing my set.

The first set was with the 55-pound dumbbells, and it went fine. My second set was with the 60-pounders, and it was, of course, more difficult, but still went fine. And for my third set, I got to try out the new 65-pounders. (That's 25 kilos, 27.2 kilos, and 29.5 kilos.)

And I just FLEW through that set. Brian said, "Wow. It looked like you were barely working at all harder than with the 60-pound dumbbells."

And I thought about it. And I picked up a 60-pound dumbbell in one hand, and a 65-pound one in the other. And I hefted them. And I handed them to Brian. Who also hefted them. And said, "No way. No fucking way."

So we went into the other room with the scale. And we weighed them. "No fucking way." So we went into the OTHER other room with the digital scale, just in case the first scale was being weird.

Nope.

Turned out that the 65-pound dumbbells weighed 62.5 pounds.

And the 60-pound dumbbells weighed . . . 62.5 pounds.

Brian's comment was, "How do you even screw that up? This thing has absolutely no function OTHER than to weigh sixty-five pounds."

Comments

[whuffle.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, that's a serious issue of product fail. *boggles*

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The sixties and the sixty-fives ARE by different manufacturers, but that shouldn't matter. As Brian said, "Sixty. Five. Pound. Weight. It's right there in the NAME. Which of those words didn't they understand?"

[seventorches.livejournal.com]

So is the 60 pound. So, two different manufacturers screwed up two different weights and arrived at the same result?!

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yup. One was exactly halfway UP to the next weight they manufactured, and one was exactly halfway DOWN to the next weight they manufactured. One was 2.5 pounds heavy, one 2.5 pounds light. As these things are manufactured in 5-pound increments, that really does seem like a fairly large error.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

You should double-check the colors on the middle of the dumbbells. I suspect you got the blue-green-black-silver and not the blue-green-black-violet.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Is this a serious reference to something I don't know about exercise weights, or a humorous reference to something entirely different that I know nothing about?

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Humorous reference to resistor color codes. The last band indicates the tolerance. Silver is +/- 10%; violet is +/- 0.01%. (And blue-green-black is 65.)

And resistors kinda look like dumbells.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Suspected something like that. Naw; my electrical engineering is limited to I installed a couple light fixtures once. All I know about electricity is 1) make sure the circuit breaker is off before you do anything, and 2) the white wire goes to the white wire, the black wire goes to the black wire, and the green wire goes to ground.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Well, you cracked up wispfox...

[cellio]

Wow. That seems like something that out to be hard to screw up. Guess not, since two manufacturers did!

[redbird]

I wonder what the tolerances are on the dumbbells at my gym. I've been assuming that the reason the 12.5-pound ones feel that much harder than the 10-pound ones is that 10 is my comfortable range, what I use most of the time for that exercise, and 12.5 is pushing it. (And some days I step down to 7.5, if it's that or not do biceps curls at all.)

And I wonder how weirdly they'd look at me if I told this story and asked if they've ever checked the weights of the freeweights.

(I know that "levels" on the exercise bikes are arbitrary and not consistent across models; I also suspect that the heart rate measurements aren't reliable.)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

We spot-checked a couple other ones: the 20-pound dumbbells were 20 pounds. The 22.5 pound ones were 22.0 pounds. Brian said that he's going to go through them all and weigh them all, mainly out of annoyance.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

This really is a funny story. I'm most amused that Brian is now weighing all his dumbbells. I wonder how many of them are off?

What are the dumbbells made of? It occurs to me that if a company used a particular metal alloy, and then that alloy wasn't available, a person who didn't know much about metals could order another one with a similar name ("it said steel!"), but the different composition would give it a different density. So the people making the dumbbells would use the same physical quantity of metal inside the weight, but the mass would be different.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

It just seems weird that both of them would be 2.5 pounds (to the nearest 10th) off, one high, one low.

[rymrytr.livejournal.com]

and if, like a lot of mass produced items in China and other places, there is little desire for quality control, you may not get what you order. Consider all the recalls that continue; kids toys, jewelry and cloths.

You could order a set of 50 pound items and get a variance with little or no recourse...

If the folks you are buying from are American Manufactures, then you may have recourse.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

If it was bought from an American company, even if it was manufactured overseas, there should be recourse of some sort.