Bells of Steel Coloured Bumper Plates
100% virgin rubber with low bounce and a stainless insert — colour without dropping to crumb.
Specs
| Plate material | 100% virgin rubber |
|---|---|
| Insert material | Stainless steel |
| Bounce | Low |
| Durometer | 88 (10 and 15 lb), 85 (25 to 55 lb) |
| Weight tolerance | 1% |
| Sizes | 10, 15, 25, 35, 45 and 55 lb pairs |
| Warranty | 90 days on 10 and 15 lb, 1 year on 25 to 55 lb |
These figures are copied from Bells of Steel’s own published specs and were last checked on 2026-08-31. Manufacturers revise products without notice, and variants differ. Confirm anything your decision depends on with Bells of Steel before you buy.
Choose this one if
- You want to read the loaded weight at a glance rather than counting
- You want 100% virgin rubber rather than a blend
- You want low bounce so a missed lift stays where it lands
The detail
Colour usually costs you material, and here it does not. The cheap route to a coloured plate is recycled crumb — that is how the pigment gets in, and it is what PRX's Color Fleck plates are. These are 100% virgin rubber, the highest proportion in the Bells of Steel bumper range, above the all-black plates' 60% and the crumb plates' 50%.
Colour coding is genuinely useful rather than cosmetic. Seeing two blues and a green rather than counting identical discs matters when you are training alone, changing weights between sets, or coaching someone.
Low bounce is the other reason to prefer these. A high-bouncing plate throws the bar back at you after a drop, which is exactly when you have missed a lift and stepped away without looking. This is the only Bells of Steel bumper range outside urethane rated low rather than medium.
The durometer split — 88 on the 10 and 15 lb, 85 above — is the same design response every good bumper maker makes: harder small plates resist the deformation that splits a thin ring of rubber around the insert.
But read the warranty anyway: 90 days on the 10 and 15 lb, one year on 25 and up. That is shorter on the heavy plates than the all-black range's two years, which is an odd pairing given the better material — worth asking Bells of Steel about before choosing between them. Do not drop 10s or 15s alone on the bar regardless.
Stainless inserts throughout, and 1% tolerance across the range.
A 55 lb option is available here and not in the all-black range, which lets you hit heavy totals with fewer plates per side.