Marcy Vintage Weight Plates

Marcy Company (Los Angeles) produced this deep-dish Olympic weight plate in the 1960s, under founder Walter Marcyan – a former competitive bodybuilder and strongman who set several pullover, one-armed snatch, and clean records before opening his first gym in 1946 and later building his own equipment line. Marcy Fitness is still in business today, but hasn’t made anything like this design in decades, so what circulates now is decades-old stock rather than a current product. The plate’s signature look is a deep-set face, a thick hub (roughly 4” across, unusually large for the era), and distinctive cast “whisker” spokes and Los Angeles lettering carried all the way down to the smallest 2.5 lb change plates – a level of detail most vintage sets drop below 25 lb.

The design’s strength is also its weakness: the deep face and thick rim/hub displace iron from the middle of the plate, leaving a thin midsection that a collector-reviewer flags as more prone to cracking and casting flaws than other vintage sets. Weight tolerance is inconsistent (examples found running up to about half a pound off their stated weight), there’s no back-side lathing or machining, and the plates run about 18” in diameter – wider than most modern plates, which means noticeable play once loaded on a current barbell. A reviewer who collects vintage iron places this set as “solidly collectible”: above Billard Deep Dish, below the highly-collectible York Deep Dish. Availability today is exclusively the used market (curbside finds, estate sales, Marketplace, eBay), and the small 2.5 lb change plates are scarce enough to occasionally sell for more than a pair of 45s.