Set your own problems on any spray wall

What is a spray wall?

A spray wall is a wall packed with holds and no set routes. You decide which holds are in, so one wall holds hundreds of problems at every grade. That is why spray walls are common at home and in the training areas of climbing gyms: they give you a lot of climbing in very little space.

The weakness is memory. A good problem lives in somebody's head or under a strip of tape, and it is gone when the tape comes off. Chalkboard gives the wall a record.

How spray walls work in Chalkboard

1. Add a wall. Give it a name. A home wall stays private to you. A wall at a climbing gym can be linked to that gym from the gym directory.
2. Add a photo. Choose a picture of the wall from your photo library. The app does not need camera access.
3. Mark the holds. Tap a hold to drop a ring on it, drag the ring into place and size it to fit. Zoom and pan to reach small holds.
4. Give each hold a role. Start, hand, foot or finish. Each role has its own colour and letter, so the problem reads at a glance.
5. Save the climb. Name it and, if you like, give it a grade.

A logbook for every problem

Record your attempts on a problem by date. When you send it, Chalkboard works out from your history whether it was a flash, a send or a repeat, so you never tag that by hand. You can also:

• Keep problems you are working on as projects, with private notes on what you tried.
• Search the climbs on a wall by name.
• Add your own grade opinion to a climb.
• Correct or remove an entry you logged by mistake.
• Link a spray-wall session to a session in your climbing logbook, so the work counts in your history.

When the wall changes

Holds move. When they do, upload a new photo and it becomes a new version of the wall. Problems set on the old photo stay with that photo, and you set new ones on the new version. Earlier versions remain in the wall's history.

Private by design

• A home wall is yours alone. It is never listed in the public gym directory.
• Wall photos are stored privately and are only shown inside the app to people allowed to see that wall.
• Nothing is posted automatically. Sharing a summary to the Community is a choice you make each time.
• You can export your spray-wall history or remove your records at any time, with or without Pro.

What you need

Spray walls are included in Chalkboard Pro. There is no separate spray-wall subscription. Chalkboard Pro is £4 a month in the UK. They run in the Chalkboard apps for iPhone and Android, because marking holds is built for a touchscreen. See what is free and what Pro adds.