About Iron Archive

A public reference for strength-training machine specifications — especially the discontinued models where no manufacturer documentation survives.

The facts nobody publishes

Two numbers decide how a machine actually trains you, and neither is in the manual:

• Starting weight — the real load with the pin at the lowest plate, carriage and linkage included.
• Leverage ratio — what the muscle actually feels, not the number stamped on the stack. On plate-loaded and cam machines the difference is large enough to make cross-gym comparison meaningless without it.

There's no single "key number" for every machine — the right one depends on how it loads (a leverage curve for cams, pulley ratio for cables, counterbalance for a Smith, and so on). Iron Archive collects these, field-measured and openly sourced.

How it's built to stay honest

• Provenance on every value — who measured it, when, how, and how sure.
• Disagreements are shown, not averaged. Two different readings both display, flagged for a tiebreak. Nothing is silently overwritten or collapsed to one number.
• Unknowns are visible — a missing value is an open invitation to add it, not a hidden gap.
• Generations are separate. A model's 1978 original and its 2010s remake are different machines, kept apart so their measurements don't contaminate each other.

Contributing

Contributors are gym people with phones, not developers. When the submission form is live, the “measure one / add it” links across the site open a prefilled submission that becomes a reviewed pull request — you never touch Git. A photo and a guessed model name is already a legitimate record.

If you're taking measurements, please follow the measurement protocol: a hanging scale, a stated range-of-motion position, three trials recorded individually.

Open by design

The whole project is public: the records, the schemas, and the code live in the GitHub repository. There's no database and no admin panel — the pull-request list is the review queue.