Best biner to hold your nuts

Ok so I have an oval carabiner for my big nuts, d shaped for medium and a small wire gate for my small nuts. I want to know what works best for you, sometimes I have nuts Unclip themselves or slide off or get caught in the hook nose of a biner and I’m curious if someone has a good biner recommendation or if it comes down to personal preference 

I use ovals for racking nuts and for me personally, they are ideal. I find it much easier to flip through them than a pear or D shape. This let's me keep more nuts on a single carabiner, which I prefer. 

As far as the nose goes, some people prefer the hook nose because it makes it harder to inadvertently drop nuts. I've never had an issue with or without a hook nose when using ovals so I have no preference.

I definitely prefer using ovals for nuts, I’ve landed on the DMM perfect O as my personal favorite 

I use a straight gate keylock biner like this one.

https://us.grivel.com/collections/carabiners/products/alpha-k1s

Much prefer having a smooth nose so the wires don't get caught on the way in/out

I have been using some original petzl spirits to rack my small and medium nuts for about 20 years. They are a fairly large d with a key lock gate so they don’t get hooked up when you try and take the biner off the nut after placing. I use a large oval for larger nuts. I carry a mix of nuts that basically makes a double set up to a bd 10 and then singles of the large ones. I’m old and learned placing stoppers but I still use a ton of nuts especially the bigger ones. I climb mostly in the colorado front range with trips to Utah California Wyoming and Nevada. I have noticed in my last couple trips to red rocks how good stoppers are there and almost prefer them to cams a lot of the time.

Israel R wrote:

As far as the nose goes, some people prefer the hook nose because it makes it harder to inadvertently drop nuts. I've never had an issue with or without a hook nose when using ovals so I have no preference.

If you do have trouble with key gates, it’ll be like four or more of your nuts quickly shooting outta there! Trust me.

I was onsighting a classic 10a pitch around here and zip, zip, zip, zip… they were off. The strange part is a couple, 2-3 landed on my foot, so I wound up doing some mid route man yoga to retrieve them, holding a jam with one hand while stretching the other to my toes. Yeesh. The others become one with the shrubs 150 feet below. Maybe we found one of those too, but there was some loss. That’s when I switched to ovals with a notch.

I used ovals at first and immediately hated them.  They'd always spin on my harness and I'd never know if the biner was right side up or upside down.  Now I mostly use my old Camp Photons with weaker gates.  They also happen to be the only thing I rack gates in, definitely helps to prevent dropping nuts when unracking.

Oval keylock +1

Personally I use a Edelrid Mission carabiner. My criteria is it has to be lightweight and a keylock. I rack my small wires and ballnuts together and never had issue. I haven’t carried larger wires in a long time. I am not a fan of ovals due to them possibly flipping and in my opinion not as ergonomic. If a big concern of yours is the carabiner becoming unclipped I would check out the Edelrid Pure Slider. I even believe there is an oval version of the slider as well. I weighed a mission it came out to 29g and the slider 43g.

I rack nuts using Wild Country Helium carabiners. They are light and large. 

I use DMM WallDO oval carabiner. It's been great for racking nuts

James Moffatt wrote:

They'd always spin on my harness and I'd never know if the biner was right side up or upside down.

You can mark which side is "up" and it becomes a lot easier to notice.

The Mad Rock oval is very cheap and works well if you want a keylock oval.

null

Thanks for the opinions! Another question is who else racks their nut key with the nuts? This is the setup I’m going to run. Also is there a thing as too much, too little for nuts on a carabiner? What’s your preferred amount?

Notched, oval, key gate, many will have different nut racking preferences. One thing I hope we may all agree upon is that it is morally flawed to rack multiple cams on a single carabiner. And also to refer to biners as krabs (but I digress). I used to climb with a guy who did that (the multi cam to biner thing). It was not just different, it was wrong.

Another vote for ovals. The Petzl OK ovals are really nice to work with.

James Moffatt wrote:

I used ovals at first and immediately hated them.  They'd always spin on my harness and I'd never know if the biner was right side up or upside down.  Now I mostly use my old Camp Photons with weaker gates.  They also happen to be the only thing I rack gates in, definitely helps to prevent dropping nuts when unracking.

Be consistent about racking gates in/out and it will always be right side up if the gate is facing the right way.  It's also much easier to tell on the wire gate ovals.

Kenneth Dougher wrote:

null

Thanks for the opinions! Another question is who else racks their nut key with the nuts? This is the setup I’m going to run. Also is there a thing as too much, too little for nuts on a carabiner? What’s your preferred amount?

Problem here is that you run the risk of dropping the nuts when working with the nut tool however, that's the way to do it with an "on lead" nut tool.

The second is better off with a dedicated tool that has a short cord leash so that you can work on a nut and have it stay clipped in the whole time (to the rope for example). This is especially useful in a aid wall environment where the nuts have been set with full body weight and need some work to loosen.

I don’t like ovals, hard to tell where the gate is sometimes.  I like a notch, otherwise the nuts can fall off.  It’s real easy to place a nut and remove the carabiner, even if it has a notch.  It’s real hard to find all the stoppers that fall off with a keylock biner.

Jeff G wrote:

I don’t like ovals, hard to tell where the gate is sometimes.

I place a paint mark on both sides at the notch. Works great although my partners are not always in tune with it.

Anna Brown wrote:

I rack nuts using Wild Country Helium carabiners. They are light and large. 

Same! Just had an extra I didn't need for anything else, and then fell in love with how it feels pulling them off the helium. 

Large, you can tell when it flips, and no snagging

I use two Black Diamond Neutrino and split them in half, than another one holds a set of Dmm peanuts.