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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I’m partial to a magnet on a stick myself. The claw is a good backup for non magnetic stuff, but the magnet on the stick works even if you can’t see what you dropped. The time I dropped a bolt into the valley of a Chevy V8 and retrieved a completely different bolt was fun. The one I was looking for came out eventually, but another had been lurking by the cam for years apparently.
We found 3 10mm sockets in a frame rail once. It was an old GM that rattled like crazy, parked at an odd angle and my buddy noticed something shinney. Grabbed the magnet on a stick and felt like we won the lottery when a 10mm came out. Looked down and it was still shinney, magnet goes down 10mm comes out. At one point we thought we had found the mythical 10mm origin point.
That’s pretty exotic, you would think the native 9/16 sockets would have driven them out.
We hypothesized that someone was used to imports and just dropped the 10mm when they didn’t fit in a fit of continued rage.
Why not both?
https://www.harborfreight.com/24-inch-2-in-1-pickup-tool-94162.html
I recently dropped a screw that fell out of the workpiece, bounced on the workbench, and landed in my shirt pocket. I usually keep a tidy workbench so I could clearly see that there were no spare screws on the workbench or on the floor nearby. Had me thinking I was going crazy for a while, and I have no idea what possessed me to check my pockets, but there it was!
Yep, the grabber, the telescoping magnetic one, a set of various sizes of round mirrors on telescoping handles, and a set of picks are incredibly handy and have lived in my my mechanicking toolbox for many years.
I just bought a combination bore scope/ DIY colonoscopy kit for looking inside of guitars, and it had a magnet attachment that looked like just the thing for retrieving nuts from inside frame rails or your colon or other hard to get to spots. I found a pesky ball point pen that was inside my mom’s piano, that was good.
I’ve generally used a magnet on a stick for retrieval. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. There may still be an 8mm socket somewhere in my truck, and I still haven’t found the jaw from my pop rivet tool that disappeared under my workbench
I know for a fact that my 1/4″ drive deep well 13mm socket is behind a bunch of trim panels surrounding the back seat of the ’99 Corolla I sold a few months ago. It has been a frustrating week or so of wrenching changing the struts on that car, and I couldn’t summon the fucks needed to do the interior disassembly needed to retrieve it.
My twenty year old self went on a trip
A trip to fix my car
It was only supposed to take a minute
But it ended up being a 3 hour chore
A 3 hour chore.
It started with Brian a skipper brave and sure
A skipper brave and sure
And his first mate Hardigan
A news site here he could make
They asked the Beau millionaire
And his Torch
The moving star Tracy,
The Smart expert
And Adrian
Here on Autopian isle.
Here on Autopian isle.
Would it help if I said set to the tune of Gilligan’s Island?
I love these things. They’re wonderful toys for children too.
The Claw! Retrieved a washer from down in the HVAC system – once in a car, once in the house. Shepherded in and started an impossible screw in the Miata. Retrieved a broken piece of gasket from inside the valve cover area on the TDI. The kids used it all the time to retrieve Legos from confined spaces. The claw resides prominently on the workshop pegboard, ready to spring into action. I choose The Claw!
I think the peak form of this tool is the one that has a magnet and light at the front, which can be unscrewed to use the traditional claw grab.
The really nice bonus of these ones as well is they are a slightly more rigid tube so they hold their shape, which can make getting past obstructions significantly easier
For years I worked over a gravel driveway. Disappeared things with great regularity.
Yeah, I feel your pain. My first house had a gravel driveway in which I worked on something like 10 cars over the years (yeah, nothing like SWG, though) and my current house thankfully has a concrete driveway but it’s quite small so I often work on cars in the grass of my front yard. I actually have two of those grabbers but they don’t work so well especially when the grass is high, lol. Telescoping magnets to the rescue!! Rusty bolts & screws blend in amazingly well with the soil in the front yard…
I was talking to a friend about how much is suck dropping a nut or bolt when working on things. He looked at me and he said “That has never happened to me.” I ended to topic of conversation. He was a OCPD retired Marine helicopter mechanic and at the time was a trans-Atlantic passenger jet mechanic. So I actually believed him.
Gee, dunno… aircraft mechanics do indeed receive a lot of training in techniques for not dropping nuts, bolts, tools, etc, etc (as do lineworkers; after all, you don’t want to be working at the top of a transmission tower and drop a nut or a wrench…heck, some tools are kept on tethers for that reason) and your friend might have been technically correct in claiming that it “has never happened” to him because he was referring only to his time as an established career mechanic after being trained and certified and not including his time as a student or novice pre-certification. Nobody is *that* perfect. So one is rather inclined to take his pronouncement with a truly hefty grain of salt…
In the early 1930s the writer William Wister Haines worked as a lineworker for several years and wrote two novels, Slim (1934) and High Tension (1938), based on his experiences. I have not read the entirety of either novel (copies of both novels, especially Slim, fetch a real pretty penny today, partly because they’re sought after by lineworkers and also railfans because there’s a lot about railroads on account of Haines’s career as a lineworker actually being with the Pennsylvania Railroad running between Chicago & the Eastern Seaboard) though the public library where I used to work did have copies, hence my passing familiarity, and I’m given to understand that Haines talks quite a bit about the training involved in learning not to drop things…
Both novels have lovely illustrations by Robert Lawson (best known for illustrating Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand and writing and illustrating books such as Rabbit Hill and The Tough Winter) with a good example being the frontispiece for Slim:
https://www.shakespeareandcobooks.com/cdn/shop/products/203_1024x1024.JPG?v=1439142021
(Yeah, easy to see why one wouldn’t want to drop a nut or a bolt or a wrench, lol)
“Gee, dunno… aircraft mechanics do indeed receive a lot of training in techniques for not dropping nuts, bolts, tools, etc, etc (as do lineworkers; after all, you don’t want to be working at the top of a transmission tower and drop a nut or a wrench…heck, some tools are kept on tethers for that reason)”
You know what you want to drop even less? A giant ass wrench. And you know where you really, REALLY don’t want to drop it? Down into a missile silo occupied by a thin skinned Titan II ICBM full of hypergolic fuel and topped with a 9 megaton thermonuclear warhead:
“At around 6:30 p.m. CDT on Thursday, September 18, 1980, two airmen from a Propellant Transfer System (PTS) team were checking the pressure on the oxidizer tank of a USAF Titan II missile at Little Rock AFB’s Launch Complex 374-7. One of the workers, Airman David P. Powell, had brought a ratchet wrench – 3 ft (0.9 m) long weighing 25 lb (11 kg) – into the silo instead of a torque wrench, the latter having been newly mandated by Air Force regulations.
Powell later claimed that he was already below ground in his safety suit when he realized he had brought the wrong wrench, so he chose to continue rather than turn back. The 8 lb (3.6 kg) socket fell off the ratchet and dropped approximately 80 feet (24 m) before bouncing off a thrust mount and piercing the missile’s skin over the first-stage fuel tank, causing it to leak a cloud of its Aerozine 50 fuel.
….
Eventually the hypergolic fuel exploded—likely due to arcing in the exhaust fan. The initial explosion catapulted the 743-ton silo door away from the silo and ejected the second stage and warhead. Once clear of the silo, the second stage exploded. The W53 thermonuclear warhead landed about 100 feet (30 m) from the launch complex’s entry gate. Its safety features prevented any loss of radioactive material or nuclear detonation.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_explosion
Oops! The only silver lining was finding out the safety mechanisms on the warhead really do work.
FOD on an airfield is the enemy, so I think it’s at least possible he was trained that well.
Used mine on a Corolla spark plug this past week. I don’t have a 14 mm spark plug socket so I needed something to grab the plug once it was loose. Used tape in the socket to reinstall the plug.
Used the magnetic one yesterday working on a log splitter. Even the little 6.5 hp engine has heat shields where you can lose a nut.
I have one.
It was needed when changing brake-lamp bulbs and one popped off the bulb-board and remained in the light fixture.
It has been used rarely ever since.
Please, splurge for one with a light
:
Good: GENERAL, 4 Jaws, 1 in Jaw Cap., Mechanical Retrieval Tool – 8M725|70396 – Grainger
Unverified (but you get the point):Amazon.com: Flexible Claw Pickup Tool with Magnet Tool Flexible telescoping Claw led Light Grabber Extend，Long 28” Four Claw 4-Claw for Small Parts Pickup Reacher Tool for Mechanics,Jewelry,Kids,etc. (Black) : Tools & Home Improvement
This is perfect for fetching things from the spider-infested corners of my garage.
The best advice I’ve seen if you drop something into an engine bay and it doesn’t hit the ground was to just write it off and buy another one. It’s probably quicker and easier than finding the thing that just disappeared into the black hole (it certainly would have been the last time I dropped a tool in an engine bay).
That said, I wish I had one of these when I had a dremel bit come loose recently and spin itself into a fully boxed rail, which only had access through a few bolt holes. I spent waaaaaay too long fishing it out with an old bike shifter cable and some tweezers. I probably should have just written that off too, but my OCD couldn’t stand the idea of it rattling around in there for the rest of my life.
That’s great until the part falls without you realizing it into the engine or transmission or in the way of anything moving in the engine…
I was working on my garage door opener and a lock washer fell and I never heard it hit the ground. after I found a new one and finished the job it fell out of the ladder when I folded up the ladder to put it away.
That sounds great if you work at a dealership or shop where the replacement part is handy, but if you’re at home that means either a trip somewhere or an online order and then waiting for the part.
In some cases I could walk to the nearest parts store and back faster than finding a disappeared nut. 😉
The magnetic ones are real handy too.
I get far more use from the magnetic one I have over the claw. I also have one that looks like a little hand and has a magnet in the middle.
I know well that sinking feeling when you drop a bolt and don’t hear it hit the ground.
And now we know the origin story of the “Angry” part of your name. 😉
I got one about a decade ago and for the life of me can’t understand why I waited so long. I’ve had a magnetic tool for 30+ years but far to often it sticks to the wrong metal bit when I’m fishing in the engine compartment for a nut or socket that I dropped.
These and the magnets are lifesavers.
This is the only thing I think of every time I see/use one of these tools.
Someone else said it first! I use mine all the time.
Yes, I regularly have GPS trackers in my sinus cavity, why do you ask?
Dang. I was going to ask you if you use it on your nose. 😀
We call them long fingers. Those and a magnetic pickup tool are life savers! I have one magnetic pickup that is extendable and has a light in the end so you can see where you’re trying to reach. It’s great!
And furthermore, they’re quite amusing in action. I get a kick out of the little fingers coming out to awkwardly grab objects. Like a mechanic’s version of those old kids penny banks where a hand pops up to grab the coin you place on the lid.
The best $3 I’ve ever spent at Harbor Freight. This thing pulled at least three miracles out of its molded plastic rear just this year alone.
These sorts of things can be a lifesaver. However, cheap parts store grabbers can cause problems too. I have a telescoping magnet type thing. It looks like a pen and has a pocket clip, but has a magnet on the end and extends out so you can grab magnetic things in tight spaces.
I was using it to pull spark plugs out of their long narrow holes after I loosened them. But the little pocket clip was loose and came off, and I’m pretty sure there was some sort of little nut or screw holding the clip on. I feared that it dropped into the engine cylinder but after a thorough search I tentatively started the vehicle with no rattle of death, and all has been fine ever since. I never did find that little part, just left the clip off and also got a better telescoping magnet.
Most plug sockets have internal rubber sleeves to grip the insulator and avoid this.
I don’t guess I knew that was a thing. I just use a regular deep well sockets and extenders.
My dad bought one of these when I was a kid, and I still have it and use it. Frequently.
Yup the claw is a good tool to have in your arsenal. So is some bubble gum, bailing wire and a lighter. Also some museum wax not only for retrieval but also to prevent dropping the fastener in the first place.
Sure magnets can work on steel fasteners and tools but since said items often fall into a space surrounded by steel it can be difficult to get it to the item w/o sticking to other things along the way in and out.
Another non-tool tool to put in your box is and old used-up compact. Sometimes a tiny mirror is exactly what you need.
Yup a mirror can be very valuable, I’ve actually got one on a stick to get it into more places.
I a set of magnets, grips, dental picks and mirrors. Also a borescope for an Android.
Old toothbrushes that you don’t mind soaking in brake cleaner!
Ohh, I have those too….
dental mirrors are nice for that also.
And poster putty…
Yup another good one.