marking tools

[Conrad_R_Hoffman]

You can buy colorants for epoxy. Pick a good one and mark tools with that. You can get really creative and mill a small spot and fill it with color. Fairly hard to remove, at least harder than most paints.

[Magicniner]

Machine small pockets into non-critical areas and use coloured epoxy to bond in RFID chips, then fit scanners with alarms to all exits
Alternatively just inform everyone that unauthorised taking is theft and that they will be dismissed and/or prosecuted if found in unauthorised possession of anything from that tool box

[Steggy]

Buy HF tools and no-one will steal them.
Or, buy a HF tool box and put good tools in it.

Reminds me of the old advice about the safest place to store a violin is in a banjo case.

As a retired violinist I must correct that statement.
Use a viola case.
~RN

Now, now. One of my music mentors was a violist—first chair, in fact, in a famous symphony orchestra.

[spro]

I love a violin and cellos. There are sounds and range which can't be reproduced. It is so active and so real that we must appreciate the younger musicians who had parents who knew as well.