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Vintage Grippers


MRabich

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vintage

I was born in 1980, so arbitrary anything made before me is vintage. Here are my exercisers:

Top Row

Universal Hand Gripper-US patent 3653659, I bought this , it's missing a piece, I will try not to buy anything incomplete in the future, looks interesting

http://patents.com/us-3653659.html

Second Row (left to right)

Unknown manufacturer dumbbell with gripper attachment. David Horne wrote in his book about such made by Charles Korth, Spaulding made pretty much identical one.

Unknown manufacturer early hand gripper with no keeper. Spread on this is a whopping 4.5 inches.

Unknown manufacturer D spring gripper. Light resistance exerciser, I bought it together with the previously mentioned gripper.

Henry Victor frame gripper from 1920s

Third Row (left to right)

The two grippers on the right are most likely Whiteleys giant exercisers, followed by two pairs of Whiteleys medium and heavy tension grippers. All those were made in the 1950s.

Improved version of Giant hand gripper, not sure whether it was Whiteleys or not.

Fourth Row (left to right)

A pair of Sandow spring grip dumbbells, the one I have has hand imprint and came with 5 springs, Sandow also made 7 spring ones, and sooner or later I will get my hands on one. He also had less springs for women and children. I believe Sandow was teaching people to do light dumbell exercises while squezzing those dumbell shut.

Harold Broom spring grip wooden dumbbells-these are light due to the wood so they must of been used as pure grippers?

Thompson dumbbells-similar to Brooms, actually Thompson's patent came before Broom.

Terry

There were number of other manufacturers that made those including Dan Lurie, Spaulding and Everlast.

Buttom Row

Terry's serpent spring hand exerciser, with leather covering

Effortless Exerciser, the coil on it is pretty much the same as a coat hanger, but this thing is huge and looks cool being hung. As a bonus it was made in Manahattan (I'm from NYC)

One exerciser I been unable to find but found an ad for it is Ralph Kiner's wrist exerciser. This looks like grand daddy of Sidewinder and Exo Wrist, I'm also a NY Mets fan so would love to get the exerciser with Ralph's name on it. Also sooner or later I will acquire an Ironman Tetting gripper though this one will cost me more money than I wish for.

Anybody else collects these old grippers?

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Nice old grip stuff....I used to use that Universal Hand Gripper at my high school back in the 70's....Universal also had another type...more like a wrist roller. I liked using them both.

Edited by Dreadnought
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  • 4 months later...

I'am from Hamburg - Germany. I found some old Grippers in my cellar. I started to search some Informations about these Hand Grippers in the WWW and found your Post from May 2015. Are you interested? I attached some original Photos.

When you are interested - please contact me --> diewolkenhh@t-online.de

Sorry for my english - I try my best...

post-24131-0-94670500-1445442141_thumb.j

post-24131-0-10154800-1445442148_thumb.j

post-24131-0-88379000-1445442154_thumb.j

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  • 8 months later...

Haven't posted anything here for a while, I acquired a couple more pieces

Ringing Dumbbells seem to be the least common of all Sandows, they make a ringing sound upon closure.  I never heard of Broncho gripper before, it was made in the 1910s, it still you force the handle into a hole, it requires good deal of dexterity, and you get a workout from it.

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These are really cool to see. Makes me want to go on eBay and try to start a collection.

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5 hours ago, NPieper said:

These are really cool to see. Makes me want to go on eBay and try to start a collection.

Neverending process, for now all I want from vintage is Desbonnet, which has alluded me, and Ironman grippers, but then there is modern stuff to train on, barrelstrength , fbbc and others make good stuff all the time, yet funds are limited.

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4 hours ago, MRabich said:

Neverending process, for now all I want from vintage is Desbonnet, which has alluded me, and Ironman grippers, but then there is modern stuff to train on, barrelstrength , fbbc and others make good stuff all the time, yet funds are limited.

I hear ya there. Looking on eBay there's a lot of cool vintage gripper item that would start a good collection. But at the same time I could be putting money aside to get a Flask or Blob. 

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Yeah I need a loading pin too. I will definitely look into getting both of those in the future when money isn't as tight due to college!

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If money is tight check what your college weightroom offers, if it doesn't have dedicated axle, you can use the ends as one, also i found sleeve of a barbell its now a vbar, and it weighs over 10 lbs on its own.  Dumbbells can be used as 2 handed pinches and hex dumbbells can be pinched with one hand up to 60 lbs if you a monster.

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56 minutes ago, MRabich said:

If money is tight check what your college weightroom offers, if it doesn't have dedicated axle, you can use the ends as one, also i found sleeve of a barbell its now a vbar, and it weighs over 10 lbs on its own.  Dumbbells can be used as 2 handed pinches and hex dumbbells can be pinched with one hand up to 60 lbs if you a monster.

Good stuff.  From what I've heard, the USAWA 2" vbar was originally the sleeve of a barbell.  So that's what it has different dimensions than the FBBC 2" vbar.  I've tried out a sleeve barbell 2" vbar and they're very effective.

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  • 6 months later...

After 3 years of searching, I got this pair of Desbonnet grippers from France.  I was told before that they are the best of spring grip dumbbells, I now agree.  

20170108_125743.jpg

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  • 1 year later...

Hah, I saw the Tylenol gripper on ebay and almost went for it.

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