Scheister TR and broken biner report

If you look at the pictures you can see some patterns—the dynamic breaks with the gate open virtually always break in the same place, right where yours did. This is the most common type of break, as it takes far less of a load to break an open-gate biner, and if the load is somehow applied out onto the nose (i.e. not aligned directly along the spine) it can take a truly small load to break—it’s not common by any means but it is not unheard of. Closed-gate breaks are FAR less common and pretty much always show significant deformation of the overall carabiner shape, and on a pinned gate or a wiregate like this they pretty much always break on the nose of the carabiner, as you see in the photo.
Generally in a real climbing situation it isn’t realistic to generate that much load in a static manner until you get into wacky hauling situations, etc.

The scenario that your carabiner broke under is actually the most common one for a biner to fail—a swinging fall causes the gate to rub against the rock, as the biner swings the rough rock pushes open the gate, and the load ends up applied out nearer to the nose of the biner than the spine (either due to the way the biner hangs in a bolt hanger or because a sling is pushed out to the side, etc), and near a belay/tied in tight so there is less rope out and less dynamic element to the belay to absorb the force of a fall. Under these circumstances it’s unfortunately not too difficult to break a biner if all the stars are aligned just the wrong way—for this reason I would recommend always doubling up pro on critical pieces or using a lightweight locking biner or something like this, especially if there are terrain features that could come into play against a biner.

The batch testing we conducted showed that there was nothing abnormal in the metal itself, and the breaks we conducted again on our stock from that batch confirmed this. All the breaks were well within the parameters we expect and well above the stated loads printed on the biners.