Does anyone use unrated carabiners for racking?

Their are often unrated carabiner options that are much lighter and more compact then climbing carabiners. If you already rack all your slings as alpine draws and plan on rarely clipping in direct, it seems like you could save weight by using lighter unrated carabiners and just carrying a few extra rated ones for when you do clip in direct. There is of course an obvious argument against doing this, it is an accident waiting to happen. I am not personally planning on trying this, so there is no need for this thread to blow up with people trying to talk me out of it, I am just curious if anyone else has tried it and what their experiences are. It offers a weight advantage over normal racking while being easier to work with than putting multiple cams on the same biner.

YGD (there it has been said, no one else needs to say it.)

No, quite the opposite - any carabiner that I might carry to the crag is climbing rated so that any mistaken use is not catastrophic. 

Alex R wrote: 

YGD (there it has been said, no one else needs to say it.)

You answered your own question

Anyone that answers yes to this question should get stoned. 

If you have a rack, you probably spent a fair bit of change on it. So skimping on a few 'biners seems ridiculous. If you have multiples of the same size, you can rack them all on one 'biner, and there is your weight and money saver. . 

light weight alpine draw. a sling and 1 biner. over your head and shoulder. you'll still need a few regular draws for your nuts if you got any...

Carabiners aren't heavy.  Use the real ones.

The level of dip$h!tery on MP never ceases to amaze me.  

The worst kind of danger is the danger you don't know you're in. I'd rather not have a carabiner at all than have a non-rated carabiner. At least if I don't have a carabiner, I know that don't have a carabiner to put weight on, so I'll make a great deal of effort not to fall or otherwise weight the nonexistent system. If I clip a non-rated carabiner not knowing it's not rated, then I'll try a lot less hard not to weight the system, and there's a much greater chance I'll weight it and die.

I get that this is not an answer to the question you're asking, but some questions shouldn't be dignified with an answer.

I kind of figured their would be a bunch of knee jerk responses like this. Maybe it wasn't worth asking the question, it now seems unlikely that there will be anything interesting said, and if there is it will be drowned out by a million voices stating the obvious.

I also just remembered that many climbing brands actually already produce unrated (plastic even) carabiners for the purpose or racking gear, it just happens to be ice screws instead of nuts and cams. What makes this an acceptable practice in ice climbing, but so taboo for rock climbing as to garner such a vitriolic response?

Alex R wrote: I kind of figured their would be a bunch of knee jerk responses like this. Maybe it wasn't worth asking the question, it now seems unlikely that there will be anything interesting said, and if there is it will be drowned out by a million voices stating the obvious.

I also just remembered that many climbing brands actually already produce unrated (plastic even) carabiners for the purpose or racking gear, it just happens to be ice screws instead of nuts and cams. What makes this an acceptable practice in ice climbing, but so taboo for rock climbing as to garner such a vitriolic response?

2/10

Those don't look like climbing biners, nor does anyone hang them loosely on another part of the harness

terrible troll

Alex R wrote: I also just remembered that many climbing brands actually already produce unrated (plastic even) carabiners for the purpose or racking gear, it just happens to be ice screws instead of nuts and cams. What makes this an acceptable practice in ice climbing, but so taboo for rock climbing as to garner such a vitriolic response?

Nothing in the above responses could be described as vitriolic. [Edited: excepted for the name calling that came as I was writing this reply.]

The difference is that ice clippers and the like are securely attached to a harness and difficult to remove. You would have be deliberately removing them from your harness (with some moderate difficulty) and they are not readily confused with other carabiner types. 

No excuse for utility carabiners.

I used to attach my gloves and chalk bag to the harness with those small, light "key ring" type biners, but like bkozak says: for another 1/2 or 3/4 of an ounce you can have a full-strength biner that can be used (left) in an emergency, so why mess around??? Same logic for non-rated biners.  You want some "leave-behind-ers", most climbing shops do consignment for used gear and non-wire gate biners go for about $2 or less.  

FosterK wrote:

Nothing in the above responses could be described as vitriolic.

Max Rausch
Anyone that answers yes to this question should get stoned.

You and I have different definitions of vitriolic.

The only biner not used is normally the ones racking nuts. So 2-3 biners to rack nuts not being rated is stupid for weight that you would never notice. All my cams etc have a biner and that biner is only not used if I use a draw to extend it. You never know when you will need to extend so you would never want a biner to rack it that wasn't rated since over 50% of the time you will use it to clip the rope into.

Alex R wrote: I kind of figured their would be a bunch of knee jerk responses like this. Maybe it wasn't worth asking the question, it now seems unlikely that there will be anything interesting said, and if there is it will be drowned out by a million voices stating the obvious.

I also just remembered that many climbing brands actually already produce unrated (plastic even) carabiners for the purpose or racking gear, it just happens to be ice screws instead of nuts and cams. What makes this an acceptable practice in ice climbing, but so taboo for rock climbing as to garner such a vitriolic response?

I get it, you don't really want intelligent discourse.  You just want affirmation for your plan.  So here you go:

You are absolutely correct!  What you propose has no drawbacks whatsoever, and I think you should continue with your plan!  Climb on, and don't let the haters hate!  

Max Rausch wrote: Anyone that answers yes to this question should get stoned. 

I think we should all get stoned at least once in our lives. Don't knock it till ya try

You have it backwards: you need to replace your heavy accessory carabiners (27 grams ( blackdiamondequipment.com/e…)) with fully certified Edelrid 19G (19 grams) or CAMP nano (22 grams) carabiners.