Technical Ever lose a tool while working on your car?

Only to find it later in a really strange place. A couple of months ago, I was doing a top end on the Buick 455. I had dropped the exhaust pipes from the exhaust manifolds and had to pull the heads off in order to get some really rusty bolts out and fix and exhaust leak.

While working on it in my shop, I dropped my 3/8 drive, 9/16" socket. I wear hearing aids so direction and sound are misleading to me sometimes. I crawled all around under the car, looked under and around everything in my shop and never could find the sucker. Finally, I drove to town and bought a replacement and forgot about it.

This past weekend, I was removing the rear portion of the exhaust system in preparation for changing the rear suspension. As I removed the right side muffler, I heard a clunk inside. I turned it upside down, rattled it around and out fell my 9/16 socket. Apparently, it had fallen straight into the down pipe and migrated back to the muffler.

That's not the first time I've found one in a weird place but it is the first time I've found one in my exhaust system.

 

Yep. I've left my share of wrenches on the rad support and inner fender lip and hear them clang to the ground when I leave my driveway. That's why I don't drink whiskey while wrenching.

 

They always fall in a hole or in the drain pan full of oil or antifreeze.

 

Who hasn't found lost tools.

Just this morning I was wrapping up the new bushings on the wagon and while laying on my back trying to drill out that broken bolt and I rearranged my drop light as to get a better view and just above and to the left was my smallest pair of needle nose vice grips.

I don't remember when I was using them and for what purpose but to the best of my knowledge they may have been stuck between the frame and the inner fender ever since I got the car running. HRP

 

I had a cutoff wheel fly out of a die grinder and didn't find it for 3 months...hiding behind the air compressor. I was working on a combine in a shed with a gravel floor and lost a 1" wrench. That's a huge wrench and you would think it would reappear somewhere, but that was over 20 yrs ago and I never saw it again.

 

Frame rails with stamping holes like to swallow sockets also. I've found quite a bit of tools left by others under the hood, you name it.. pliers, wrenches, specialty tools..

 

I've found some but never lost any. I couldn't get the speedo cable to go back into my 56 3 spd OD trans that I had pulled out 6 months earlier. The hole faced up and I could not see into it. Finally I took my mechanics magnet fished it into the hole and pulled out a 5/16 nut. I have a set of body shop vise grips that was still on the pinch weld where they had hung a new quarter panel. I have a pretty cool home made brass hammer that laid on top of a GM cat.converter so long that the home made handle was charred from the heat.

 

I have lost at least one of everything at one time or another they always come back.

I was towing a car from here to the lake of the Ozarks back in the '80s. I had used a ballpeen hammer to adjust something ( I don't recall what) and evidently left it on the step bumper of the old chevy truck I was driving. I found it the next morning when I got up to drop the trailer and unload.

 

My uncle used to say we needed to attach a tobacco sack to my grandfather's crescent wrenches he carried on the tractor because he had lost so many in the fields.
I've lost my share and found my share of tools when I was working in shops. I finally went to using a TV tray to set the tools I used during the repair on that car on so I wouldn't leave them under the hood.

The best found tool I heard about was in the mid 70's when a friend at the dealership I worked at had a new Pontiac that the customer complained had a rattle in the passenger side door. He pulls the door panel off and looks inside and there is a 1/2 inch impact and socket laying in the door. Pulls them out and puts them in his tool box, puts the door panel back on and says "it's all taken care of".

 

When working on my 62 Falcon i used a pair of visegrips to hold on to the welded nut in the fender for the hood hinge- didn't see them until i loaded on the trailer for sale. The i looked in the fender of the 61 falcon i just bought and found another just like it, but older. So I almost lost one, but found another! On the exact same welded nut, no less! -rick.

 

When we die we get all our tools back, I will be under the pile of 1/2-9/16 wrenches

 

In the early 70's, Sears used to have specials on combo wrenches for $1.....I used to buy 6 of a 9/16" size at a time because I laid them on the cowl when the hood was open. If I worked on the same car twice, the wrench was often still there. I have found other brands on the cowl that were not mine.

 

Worked with a mechanic years ago who got a return on a valve job he had done on a SBC. It was making a funny noise. He went back into the engine and found a 1/2"-9/16" box end wrench laying in the valley bouncing around on the lifters and push rods.

The "foot" on my floor jack came up missing. I looked in the garage and the shop for it and finally gave up. I made one for it out of a round bar and piece of round plate. Sometime later I was changing oil on my OT daily driver 2007 Chevy truck. I looked up into the front frame area and there was the foot wedged up in the left lower control arm/frame area. It had been there since the previous oil change.

 

I seldom lose tools while working on cars, customers' or my own. But one day, working on my wife's O.T. BMW Coupe, I had a 3/8" drive 11 mm socket fly off my air gun. It went under the big toolbox, (2 bottom boxes alongside, on a special chassis...) a real pain to move.
It was a Snap-On socket, one of a set; extra deep, with the 2 black rings around the base. Snap On man said the set was obsolete, now the extra deeps are semi deep, they are the only 'deeps'.
(Big deal? To me it was, all the sets are on rails in the top of the right hand top box, highly visible)
I searched swap meets, tool guys at flea markets. Then I found one, on the bay. $7, plus $2 shipping!
I placed it in its 'glory spot', and stood back to admire it.

Something shiny caught my eye...down behind one of the 8" caster wheels of the main boxes...Aggh! My missing 11 mm Snap On socket!

It was O.K., the day I bought wife Joey her BMW Coupe, I found a Snap On 11/16" long combination wrench under the hood, behind the grille. (some Chevy mechanic musta thought the BMW was a Chevy bubbletop!)
Forgot to say: My Snap On 11/16" long wrench had been missing, this one was its replacement.

 

Nothing will piss you off more than getting in your car & remembering that the screwdriver you was looking for is in your back pocket & has left it's mark in your seat upholstery.
ad whole set of proto 1/4" drive sockets that I forgot I laid on the running board of my 34 5W. Took it for a test drive & came home only find out the next day I couldn't find my sockets. Went back over my route & found a couple along side the road but nothing else. I put up a sign offering a reward & my neighbor calls & ask if I had lost anything. He found them on a curve & I finally got everything back including the metal box they came in. Yeah I took him a beer or six.

 

Fortunately,I have never done this but I know a guy that did,,with brand new upholstery. HRP

 

working on a car where another guy had made a crappy inner rocker repair with an aftermarket piece that was nothing like what it was supposed to fix, so we were going to cut parts off another car and do it right. when I cut it off there was a Stanley screwdriver inside the rocker panel. that is a rattle that would have never gone away.

I'm sure I have lost tools and found them later, but can't think of any right now

 

I have lost several small wrenches, both metric and inch after leaving them on the bleeder valves. I never find them even though I look up and down the road.

I lost my new 1/4 ratchet and 5/16 socket a month or so ago and decided that I had left it under the hood of my OT truck when I disconnected the battery. Bought new replacements after walking up and down my road and not finding them. A week or two later, I moved a grease rag on my a bench that I don't use often and, you guessed it. I now have two new 1/4 ratchets and sockets.

 

In the mid eighties, I was up in Browning Montana at a junkyard pulling a power seat mechanism from a '54 Mercury that was on top of a stack of cars. After I arrived back home in Reno, I realized my 1/2" drive ratchet was missing, and realized I must have lost it at the yard. In the early 2000's, the same wrecking yard was auctioning all their inventory off, and the '54 Merc was one of 23 cars I bought there. I flipped the front seat back over from where I had laid it back to get the power unit out, and there was my ratchet I had lost years ago. Moisture had gotten inside and seized it, but our Snap-On dealer rebuilt it free of charge.

 

doubt there's ever a time working on one of my cars where I don't lose a tool...

 

Kind of a different 'lost tool' story. Years ago, while doing a preflight inspection on my Cessna Cardinal, I found a gouge in the backside of the prop root. I looked in the engine cowl and saw a long I/2" socket extension with spark plug socket attached laying on the top of the engine. Further inspection revealed a dented push rod tube. Evidently what had happened was, after performing the annual inspection, the "FAA licensed" mechanic left the tool lying on the engine. Sometime during a subsequent flight the extension slid forward and was whacked by the prop which threw it back inside the cowl denting the push rod tube. When I confronted the mechanic he shrugged and said "hey, stuff happens". He did fix the damage and I kept the tool. Needless to say subsequent inspections were performed elsewhere.

 

Its always the 3/8-Drive 9/16" socket...

...and its usually under the stationary workbench, under the fridge, in the neighbors livingroom, on a slow boat to china, or wherever all my missing socks go.

 

When I was an aircraft mechanic and changing a DC-8 retractible landing light found a fume proof flashlight someone left there the last time the light assembly was changed.

 

Back in the days of full serve gas, it was SOP to check for tools while you were checking oil. We recovered a lot of tools on the full service island that the guys had left under the hood, sometimes months earlier. I usually got a cold beer as bounty.

 

I found someone's cheap 7/16" wrench stuck to a big speaker magnet, & both left inside the left rear QP of my '47 Plymouth. I've owned this car about 30 years and never knew it was in there. The car was repaired & painted in the 70's & it had probably been there 40 years.

But at about the same time I found an expensive 7/16" wrench, left by me, up under the dash, stuck on a nut that holds a short brace. Evidently I'd left it there when I changed the speaker in the dash, back about 1985. The nut was about half-stripped and the wrench was really on there.

 

Ever wonder why most tools are chrome plated? So that they are slippery and easy to lose! Tool manufacturers are evil geniuses! That's my theory, anyway.

 

Lost my tape measure about 2 yrs ago, never found it. Lost my caulking gun a few times,All accounted for now. I have 3 of them.

 

I never loan tools as I know I will be missing one or two if they ever come back ( my theory is you do not have the foresight to buy them then you should take it to a mechanic ) , My former BIL knew that so he came to the house when I was on the road and my ex wife allowed him use of my tools , he took my S-O 1/4 inch set ( deeps and regs both metric and sae and extensions in the nice holder set ) ( about $500 at the time ) out to work on something on his car and proceeded to leave the whole set on the front bumper and filler and drove off ( o/T late 70's OLds) , when I came home that weekend I was mowing the grass and hit a socket took out my living room picture window ( you know the 4x8 one in the center)and hit the wall , ( was P.O'd. about that ) but then I saw other sockets and such along the drive and on the edge of the street , picked them up and saw my markings . went in the garage opened the box and found them missing , asked the wife , she fessed up . insurance paid for the glass , but BIL was forced to walk along street and find my other tools and paid for what he didn't find or were damaged ( $290 I remember ) and I changed the locks on the garage and kept on set of keys hidden in the house . , I was always a rack tool person, the car or project doesn't move till the hole in the rack is filled . freind of mine is a A&P guy and taught me that . Now I have a seperate box filled with H-F tools to borrow out .

 

I "heard" a box end wrench I didn't know I lost one day. Unfortunately, it bounced off the road and "stared" a fender from the inside before bouncing down the road behind the car. Errrr.

For those of you who may not know, mechanics on aircraft and other sensitive / expensive stuff have to account for all their tools after completing any job - sometimes with a witness to verify the count. It's that or suffer the risk of damaging something more expensive than your average SBC. Gary

 

when I can't find a tool I usually go get another, then get back to working and set the next one right where I left the other...