Clip keys together with tiny carabiners
I’ve always found it annoying to have a bunch of keys in my pocket (they’re heavy, sometimes poke into you, and create weird bulges), so I try to carry as few as possible. Unfortunately, I’ve reached a point where I have a fairly large number of keys that need to keep with me sometimes:
Default key chain: Apartment key, apartment key fob, USB security key, mail key
Car key
Bike key
Storage keys
Multitool (I know, it’s weird that I don’t always carry this, but it’s heavy)
Previously I kept all of these except the storage keys on one keyring, but I recently realized that tiny carabiners exist, which means I can keep all of the non-default keys clipped to a storage area and then add just the keys I need during the day.
For example, most days I just need either my car key or bike key.
The downside of this is that the caribiner itself adds size and weight, so if I needed to carry the full set of keys it would be even worse. Luckily, that doesn’t seem to happen to me (and some keys are mutually-exclusive, like the bike and car key). If you do have a large number of keys you need together, this won’t help you.
The specific ones I bought were this 12-pack of tiny caribiners on Amazon, but I don’t have any particular faith in this clearly-random-name-generator company. This size is perfect for the non-hook size to hold a tiny key ring with 2-3 keys. I didn’t get double-caribiners because I don’t have any need to quickly detach the keys themselves, and that would make them slightly bigger.
I thought this might be a place where other people who care unusually-much about the exact weight of their pockets might congregate, so if you feel similarly, consider getting some tiny keyring carabiners.
Security note: you probably don’t want to leave photos of your keys on the Internet. They can be copied pretty easily from only an image, even at a surprisingly oblique angle.
I’ll make a note to blur them or something, but I suspect anyone with the motivation to copy my keys from the internet could probably pick any of these locks too.
I think very cheap carabiners are extremely fragile especially for repeated use. I saw a failing mode where the mobile axis just opens in the wrong way by going around the stator. Keep that in kind when choosing which carabiner to use.
Might be better to keep using ring keyholders but have one decently strong carabineer to hold the rings together instead of what you did : tiny carabiners that hols onto a ring no?
Oh yeah, that’s a good idea. You’d need to find a sufficiently small carabiner (most actually-good ones are pretty big), and I think you’d need to put the keys on larger rings than I used to be able to get a carabiner through them. I think if you wanted a stronger system that would work, although it might end up being bulkier.
I’m not really worried about strength myself though. The carabiners are probably not as strong as the listing says (15 kg max weight), but I only need them to hold the weight of a couple keys.
I don’t have lots of keys, or frequent changes to which ones I want to carry, but a tiny carabiner has still proved useful to make individual keys easily separable from the bunch.
As an example, being able to quickly and easily say “here’s the house key: you go on ahead and let yourself in, while I park the car” without the nuisance of prying the ring open to twiddle the key off.