If there’s one thing I’ve learned while working on cars, it’s that things don’t always go as planned. You can watch that YouTube tutorial as many times as you’d like, but the second a screw strips its threads or that rusty bolt refuses to break free, it’s up to you to figure out a new solution.
In my case, things don’t go as planned because of something I did, not because of the car. I’m a clumsy guy, which means I tend to drop things. You should see what my phone protector looks like right now. Though I try to be careful about keeping things in my hands while working on cars, I’ll inevitably drop something—usually a small nut or bolt—onto the ground, where I watch it fly at seemingly supersonic speed under a collection of drawers or parts in the corner of my garage, never to be seen again.
The ensuing search for said nut or bolt naturally takes hours and involves tearing my entire workspace apart. Like my boss, David Tracy, I absolutely hate wasting time. Time is the only thing you can’t get more of. So spending a bunch of it looking for a 2-cent piece of metal isn’t very fun for me. Things get even worse when the nut or bolt in question falls into the engine bay. In those cases, the fastener always seems to find the exact worst nook or cranny where it can’t be reached by hand. Then, it becomes a situation where you might have to jack up the car and take off the underbody protection just to reach a single bolt you dropped. Agony.
I’ve Needed This Tool Since I Started Working On Cars
I first started working on cars when I got out of college. A few friends and I rented out a shop space so we could keep our once-expensive BMWs roadworthy, no matter how badly they wanted to die. I dove right into the deep end; my first real project was an E60 M5—the one with the V10. As you can imagine, this car had a pretty tight engine bay. And it nearly drove me to insanity.
On paper, the E60 isn’t a particularly difficult car to work on—there’s no complex turbo system or wild all-wheel drive setup to worry about. But there’s barely any space between any of the components under the hood, making some simple tasks far more annoying than they’d be on, say, a six-cylinder version of the car. You have to remove acres of plastic and wires to do just about anything, which means handling dozens of easy-to-lose fasteners. As you can probably guess, I dropped these often.
Magnetic retrieval tools like this one worked for some screws, but half the stuff I dropped was plastic. For months, 22-year-old me resigned himself to knowing he could turn a 30-minute fix into a three-hour job with a finger slip. Then, while browsing for tools mindlessly online, I discovered this wildly simple and affordable grabber tool.
This Metal Stick Is a Godsend
The tool above goes by many names. I’ve seen it called a grabber tool, mechanical fingers, a four-claw picker, and a reacher tool. As any of these names suggests, it’s designed to reach small objects that your fingers can’t, like in the deep caverns of an engine bay, behind the trim of a trunk space, or the inside of a door. A thumb-operated plunger on one end of the metal rod is pushed down, extending four little spring-steel claws on the other end to form a mechanical hand. Releasing the plunger brings those claws back into the bendable tube, snatching anything up in the process.
This was exactly the thing I needed to keep myself from going mad the next time I dropped a bolt. Since I found out something like this existed, I’ve had it by my side whenever I do a DIY job. It’s an invaluable asset, not just for snatching up lost bolts, but for installing fasteners in hard-to-reach places. I’ve used it to great effect for starting nuts onto the tops of engine mounts, for example.
For the sake of this article, I decided to play a game of “find the nut” to test out the efficacy of my grabber tool. I tossed a small nut into the engine bay of my Miata and, to no one’s surprise, it fell into the abyss (in this case, the top of the subframe holding the engine up). Though I could’ve probably eventually grabbed the nut with my fingers, the grabber tool made that task a much cleaner and easier job.
Not only has this tool lowered my anxiety when it comes to working on cars, but it’s also made me far more confident to dive into tasks. Without fear of thinking I might lose a bolt to a scary engine bay, I can work more quickly. Best of all, these grabber tools cost almost nothing. Craftsman makes one that looks a lot like mine for just $9.99 on Amazon right now. For something that makes life so much easier, you’d be crazy not to have one of these things on standby.
Top graphic images: Brian Silvestro
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[Ed note: This post contains an Amazon affiliate link, so if you buy something after clicking that link, we might get a small commission. – MH]
I too am clumsy and tend to drop at least one bolt/nut/socket into the engine any time I’m doing anything…even if no bolts/nuts/sockets are in play. I will lose sleep tonight at the thought of intentionally tossing one into the engine bay just so I can try to find it. 😀
used mine just yesterday. Dropped a screw down under the tinwork on the 914. tried the magnet – didn’t work, just kept sticking to other things – ye olde grabber FTW again.
So are these good to use on “mustard nuts”? Ha ha
Picked one up out of boredom while waiting for an Advance Auto Parts employee to look up whether they had the specific formulation of coolant the manufacturer currently recommends for my bipolar eurotrash daily. Thought nothing of it, then I dropped a minuscule screw into The Abyss. Saved me a few hours of headache and what was left of my sanity. Would recommend getting a magnetic one, makes life a helluva lot easier.
I grab a small neo.. magnet in the claw and use it!
Get one of the ones with the magnet ring on the end instead.
I call mine “The Claw”, with drama for effect. It’s on my bench now, and I’ve used it in the last 24 hours.
I have one of those, and you’re absolutely right – no tool kit is complete without one. I was a long time devotee of the telescoping magnet with a pocket clip, similar to a tire gauge or a ballpoint pen, and that goes straight back to my family’s longtime mechanic, Max, and a very inappropriate compliment he paid to his once when we were working on my car.
Now, you have to understand, Max is very… rural, born in Alabama in the middle of nowhere in the ’50s, which means that it would be quite improper for me to explicitly say what he said, in his manner of speaking that sounds exactly like a cross between Hank Hill and Boomhower with some choice language courtesy of someone like George Wallace, but: some sort of nut or bolt or screw dropped into the engine compartment, and after a couple of curses, he reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out his magnet, and retrieved the lost fastener. As he collapsed the magnet to put back in his pocket, he held it up and looked at it a moment and said to no one in particular, “Boy, I tell ya whut, I’ve got lots of tools I’ve spent more money on, but I wouldn’t take a gold [N-word] for this thing right here.”
Even my south Alabama ears were jarred – a gold WHAT now? I never heard anyone before or since use that expression. But still, you take his point, LOL. I bought one the next day.