Marking Carabiners

Ending my thinking and  went with oil based paint pen. Modern carabiners are often I beam construction so paint in a recessed section should last sufficiently long. 2 different colored paint blobs are unique enough and easy to spot.

This article was the most comprehensive one I found and didn't come up on google immediately blog.weighmyrack.com/ways-t…

Paint pen, nail polish and engraving are all good. I have used the same nail polish bottle for the past 7-8 years. Still 80% full.
Mark it where it wont rub off. Which is not a hard thing to do.

Tape though, is not the bees knees.

I had a gear painting party with friends, we used nail polish- held up great.

Paint pen

two colors nail polish last forever on the gear and in the bottles. If you pick a decent place to mark it will stay forever. 15 years and going in some gear. 

More cost effective may be to simply use Testors model paint. A little dab will do ya. Use the product "Goof off" and a paper towel to clean and reuse yer brush. Don't get it in between yer cams moving parts (and keep it off of the slings) as seen above. Nail polish also does the trick (for more money) and you can get some pretty sparkles too:-).  Don't breath it in while wet or get the pretty sparkles in your eyes. 

I know this post is almost 2 years old but are there any among you who know or tried Etching Marker Pen. Would it be safe? They are used to permenatly mark metal.

What you guys think?

Surprised nobody has mentioned Cross Check. I found out about this stuff on here a while back. It's meant to mark bolts in engines etc. so you can visually verify later on that they haven't loosened. Its much more durable than nail polish or paint pen

Downsides are it is pretty thick, so it takes some technique to apply well; and it takes 24 hrs to truly dry.

Plus side is I've never had to reapply it, even on carabiner spines. It seemed like I was always losing my marks with nail polish.

I find the trick is to use a heat gun to get it loosen up and flow a bit more, otherwise your mark can end up being a bit of a glob.

I’m going to see if I can laser one of mine. 

i second the metal stamping idea.  
i bought an inexpensive set of stamping dies and found a bit of scrap to serve as an anvil
might be able to get all you need for this for cheap from Harbor Freight

My thoughts; depends: why you mark your gear.
Is it because easy to sort gear, after the climb or when there are more parties on the belay station. Paint or nail polish will do.
Though tags are wonderful, put your email address on it, if found, taken by accident, etc it can be returned. (Or be kept or sold on eBay by removing the tag.)
If I start thinking about stamping engraving it is an indicator to me, I am getting paranoid or wasting my time, better go climbing (it is raining at the moment).
I recommend if you are worried about your climbing partners or other climbers taking … then don’t climb with them or go climbing elsewhere.

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I use nail polish. A lot of my gear I bought used so I used acetone to  wipe off old the nail polish marks and random tape remnants from previous owners. I noticed that many people use a single swab of one neon or bright hue, so I did the opposite to make it easier to sort gear. 

Instead of a fully saturated hue that competed with the brightness of all the boldly colored cams and carabiners, I went with pastel colors. Instead of using one color like most, I did 2-3.

I got a 6 pack of nail polish from Amazon for $10.

The nail polish kit had a lighter and darker blue, so I used the darker blue on lighter colored carabiners and the lighter blue on darker colored carabiners.

I marked the cams on the bottom, so I can easily flip them upwards when they are racked on a gear loop and know what’s mine. I have an assortment of BD, totems, and mastercams, so it was a unfiying factor of a consistent place that each cam had for marking.

It was a bit of work but I was sick for a few days so I busted out the mask, acetone, nail polish, and used a skewer to mark over 200 carabiners and a quad. 

Wish I had pictures on hand, but I let my 5yr (at the time) daughter and her playmates decorate them with nail polish. She kept asking, so I compromised. If you can put it neatly on my gear, I'll let you put it on your hands. 

One of my friends was gracious enough to offer to laser engrave mine for me after the electrical tape I had been using kept getting torn up

Matt Robinson wrote:

One of my friends was gracious enough to offer to laser engrave mine for me after the electrical tape I had been using kept getting torn up

This is such a great idea. Were you able to get it to engrave on curved surfaces? 

Steve Astar wrote:

Wish I had pictures on hand, but I let my 5yr (at the time) daughter and her playmates decorate them with nail polish. She kept asking, so I compromised. If you can put it neatly on my gear, I'll let you put it on your hands. 

So you let your 5 year old mark your gear?

Luke Lalor wrote:

I used to mark my gear but then stopped. It just seemed to make me more likely to lose my non-marked gear.

On the off chance somebody uses the same racking biner as you, same model/generation gear, the gear is in about the same shape, and they don't mark their gear, who really cares what you end up with.

I haven’t marked gear in half a dozen years and yet I’m capable of recognizing my stuff. Is it really that hard?

Jiggs Casey wrote:

I haven’t marked gear in half a dozen years and yet I’m capable of recognizing my stuff. Is it really that hard?

IMO it doesn’t matter at all if you just climb a partner, but for groups (especially multi day or if you’re lending gear or packing up in the dark) it’s a PITA if gear isn’t well marked. Less a matter of recognizing your own gear and more so everyone can dump their packs and easily split up gear into 3+ piles.

Helped a feller teach a clinic summer before last...we mixed our gear up and had a sort back at the end of the day.  Still felt like I was missing a biner as one of my alpine draws was a biner short.  No biggie.

Got a text a few days later, "Pretty sure this is the missing biner!  Especially since it has your name on it...twice!  Ha ha.  Oops"

Even sent me a pic.  We both got a chuckle out of it.  He still has the biner.  Pretty sure I found one of his...

Good times.

Spray bomb it. Lay out your biners (on an unfolded box or some such), and use yellow (Orange is taken!)  spray paint and paint the spines yeller, a splooge on each one.

"If its yellow, its mine!"

Takes 5 seconds for one side, 5 seconds for the other. You spend more time flipping the biners over than you do painting them. Yes if you use your rack the paint will wear off over time. Two, three years down the line? Spray bomb them again.