Still mucking about with repairing my dozer, dropped a couple of nuts and they went tink into the inner bowels of the tracks on the ground under the track frame and blowed if I can find them. I am sure they have gone through some inter-dimensional gateway, never to be seen again.
I took the carburetor off my Dad's golf cart last night. Cramped space, small nut, slipped out of my finger. I heard one distinct 'tink', then nothing. Thirty minutes later I found it under his car parked 10 ft away. Thankfully I was on a fairly clean concrete floor.
Yep a belly pan is a direct path for dropped wrenches, sockets, bolts and nuts straight into the Multiverse. Where in the Multiverse is anyone's guess..
The bilges of of old tugboats can also yield a trove of treasures when you pull a gear or the engine. all you hear is a splash when something drops and disappears in black oil.
when eventually you do find the nuts you will pick up a couple of long lost 9/16 spanners as well
10mm sockets can time travel
You will also pick up a new special language when you can't find what you dropped! Hope the kids are inside when the special language comes out!
All of these things are examples of why every last thing must be retrievable with a magnet. Woe is thee when you drop some British aluminium or a copper crush washer that you waited weeks for.
I usually call that a religious moment.
This is the “law of falling objects” The nut, bolt, etc will travel a very large distance from the drop zone!
Occasionally I have had success by dropping a similar object in the same way to watch and follow the first. Not always, though.
I was removing a floor plate when my ratchet and socket slipped out of my hand and fell into the belly pan. It was the only one I had, so I had to fish it out, so I slid under the dozer and put my hand through the round drain hole in the bottom of the pan. Using only touch, I found the items shown below. Fortunately, my ratchet and socket were in the treasure trove. I believe that I had lost the knife about six months earlier. I've christened my belly pan as the place where parts and tools go to die!
There’s an old flip phone under the left hand steer clutch in my d4d.
I dropped a Snap-On 9/16 combination wrench into a steering clutch housing on a JD 350. Never found it, but I told the owner I would be happy to work on the machine if he ever needed to pull that side apart. Never got the chance. He passed away several years later and the family sold his equipment off. I’ve planted a lot of tools over the years. Found a few that others have lost, too. I’m still behind.
The circle of iron. One guy looses his, but finds someone else's. And that just continues. Once found a ⅜ fine tooth Matco ratchet . Gave it to the tool guy, now I has a new ratchet. The coolest find, was doing a pony motor in a D9. In the belly I found an 1½ Snap-on combination wrench. It was at the bottom of the sediment but it cleaned up beautifully. Carried that for 15 years or so till someone else wanted it more than me.
That has never worked for me, tried it several times and wound up with twice as many missing parts.
Or find dead center of what you're working on.
for emergencies.
I was a fool with my socket set box, and the 120 ate an 11/16 deep and the U-joint out of a 3/8" Snap on set I got when I was in high school. Arg!
The belly pan of heavy equipment and the engine room bilge of a boat are black holes leading to another universe.
Yes but the bilge absolutely pollutes anything that it gets. OMG the grossness!. My very first job around a crane was hired on as a pile Buck because I knew what a chainsaw was. We set up 160 ft of boom in this 50-ton truck on a Friday. On Saturday night the storm blew up and sunk the tugboat, and on Monday I got loaned out to the tugboat captain to clean up the mess. That Bilge gunk came up and coated everything.