One of the most frustrating experiences as a car enthusiast is when you’re wrenching in your car’s engine bay, accidentally drop a small tool or part, and just cannot find it. This situation, despite the frustration it causes, is also sort of funny. It doesn’t seem to matter how small or large the engine bay is; if you drop a socket, it just seems to disappear into a portal, possibly never to be seen again.
But where did it go? Sockets don’t just disappear!
So yeah, the subject of lost tools is on my mind this week. On Sunday, the Scion iQ in my shared fleet got new plugs, coil packs, and a gas pedal replacement. The surgery was successful, despite the absurd design of the Scion iQ’s engine bay. However, there were two casualties: one 14mm socket and one 10mm bolt. Where did they go?
Honestly, I spent way too much time looking for both. A lot of it was because I was stubborn. “A Scion iQ is barely larger than a Smart,” I thought, “how could a big 14 mil socket just disappear into a tiny engine bay?”
I got serious in my search. I busted out my ramps, pulled out my best flashlight, and even deployed some magnets. I feel like I searched every inch of the engine bay, and yet, I found nothing. Well, that’s not true. I did find some crusty subframe rust. This is a big oof, and a candidate for fluid film:
My search for the lost 14mm got so desperate that I started checking the cracks of the parking lot and under parked cars for my missing socket. Apparently, I must have looked quite suspicious when doing this, because one of my neighbors gave me a dirty look after I checked under someone else’s car for my socket.
My desperation grew to a level where I got into the Scion, hit the gas, and then slammed on the brakes. When that didn’t produce the socket, I started bumping the car into a low curb, hoping I’d maybe jostle the socket free or something. That failed, too.
Sadly, all efforts failed, and once I ran out of daylight, I gave up. I hope my 14mm is enjoying its new life. It served me well and went out like a boss after successfully freeing some nuts. The bolt was also a lost cause. Who even knows where that went?
But I can’t stop thinking about this. It’s not like I was working in a place with a lot of nooks and crannies. While the Scion iQ’s engine bay is tight, you can still see through it to the ground. The car doesn’t even have a belly pan that could catch a wayward socket. I spotted a flat area on the engine and transaxle that could hug a socket, and even that area was empty.
In hindsight, maybe I could have used my borescope camera to get an extra eye in the engine bay, but who knows if I would have been successful there. Sheryl has even driven the car at least a few hundred miles since we completed the work, so who knows where the socket could be.
Here’s where I turn things to you. What tools have you lost in your car? Did you find them? If so, how did you do it? What other sorts of mayhem have dropped tools caused in your garage? I’m looking at you, guy I saw on Insta who set his garage on fire when a dropped wrench fell across the battery terminals and arced. Yikes!
Top graphic images: Mercedes Streeter; Craftsman
10mm 1/8-inch drive socket fell off of my short extension and in between the inner and outer deck lid panels of my 2016 Charger while installing a spoiler. I was never able to get it out. It would torture me every singe time I would open and close the deck lid because it would roll back and forth in between panels while never rolling anywhere near a spot that I could grab it. Rattle-rattle-rattle it would go each and every time. This went on for about three years until I traded the car in.
I saw the car driving on Telegraph one day on the opposite side of the metro area. Considering the typical life of a car on that side of town, I can only imagine that my 10mm socket, a Craftsman by the way so one of my good ones, made its way to a junk yard where it was compacted even more permanently into the deck lid before being sent to metal recycling.
I’m sure I have lost a 10mm socket, but I have never lost a bolt, which would be a lot more concerning to me. What is now going to hold something that needs to be held into place?
Mercedes, please do not aspire to become an A&P mechanic. In my C-150 ownership days, my A&P let me help him unscrew the access plates and then told me to go out and get a coffee. Saved maybe $100 on the annual and allowed me to see what was going on under or usually above those access plates. Low-end Cessnas were just tractors with wings.
It fell inside the radiator cooling fan shroud. Of course I didn’t know until I replaced the radiator >15 years later due to cracked plastic end tank. Transferring the shroud from old radiator to new: “Aha, that’s where it went!”
Based on the circle of bent cooling fins, it occasionally went merry-go-round on the fan. That looked like an activity I should have heard but I never did.
Lost my share of sockets etc. but the best was a “find” – a half-inch drive Snap-On ratchet sitting on top of an upper control arm of an old Dodge van I had many years ago (apparently left there after a shop did an alignment) – van is long gone but I still have the ratchet.
When I was replacing a battery I had a socket drop down and ended up on top of the skid plate under the engine. I managed to fish it out, but ugh.
When I was 16, I dropped a small nut right down the barrel of the carb on my Mustang’s turbo 2.3. I don’t want to disclose why I was messing around with a loose nut there, suffice to say it involves a “trick” that stupid people like myself used to resort to in order to coax power out of that setup. Luckily, I wasn’t far from my friends house, so I walked over there and got a mechanic’s helper magnet from his dad’s toolbox to fish it out. Thankfully, I did not attempt to drive it there.
I dropped a nut in the engine bay of my ’88 Fiero GT when I was doing some off-season work on it in early 2020. I couldn’t, for the life of me, find it anywhere. Sadly, in my second drive of the season, someone totaled the car in a pretty nasty accident. Fortunately, I got away without serious injuries. As I was walking the scene of the accident, I found the nut sitting there on the ground. I have it sitting in my watch box on my night stand.
Dropped a phillips bit into the engine bay of my Prius and never saw it again. I’m so damn OCD that I actually did get my boroscope out and poked it into every nook and cranny of the engine bay and still couldn’t find it. I finally stopped when I realized I could replace the bit in my tool set from a pile of bits in my basement, but I bet I spent an hour or two looking for that damn thing.
More recently, I had to take a Dremel to a misaligned bolt hole on my lift and at one point the grinding bit came loose and fell into the hole, which unfortunately was in a fully boxed steel beam with only a few bolt holes here and there for access. I actually managed to fish it out after a great deal of aggravation (my boroscope and a pair of long tweezers were invaluable), but again I lost at least an hour, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was two. Super annoying, but at least there isn’t a dremel bit rattling around in there now. 🙂
A few years back I had to replace the exhaust gaskets on my ’09 Sport Trac with the 4.6. This, of course, meant that about 1/3 of the exhaust bolts broke and I needed to drill them out. Annoying, but no big deal with the jig and sleeves I bought knowing this would eventually be an issue. Got everything drilled out, new bolts in, new gaskets on, reconnected everything without issue, then went to put all my tools back in their correct spots and…. no jig. Of course, it couldn’t still be on the studs – the exhaust wouldn’t have gone back on. And of course, it is anodized aluminum so it wouldn’t be magnetically attached to any subframe. After search everywhere through the garage/driveway/toolboxes/engine bay and everywhere else I could think of, I finally resigned myself to the fact that it MUST have been discarded during my cleanup from the first day (drilling and re-tapping) to the second day (reassembly).
Fast forward about 5 months and I get a text message from my father who, while clearing snow from his garage apron in the spring, discovered the jig. Somehow it had fallen somewhere below the exhaust manifold on the passenger side engine compartment and remained unseen for a couple thousand kms around home AND the 1200km drive to rural Alberta before dislodging and falling onto fresh snow when we went for Christmas.
Several 10mm and other small sockets lost over the years, never to be seen again. I recently bought one of those little packs of different 10mm sockets from Harbor Freight, but I haven’t had the chance to use them or lose them yet.
I did buy my first borescope not too long ago to inspect inside the body panels of my old 240 wagon before I seal the rust holes, but I haven’t used it yet. I’ll have to remember it the next time I drop a socket for all the not-line-of-sight areas.
I lost my flashlight after repairing the window regulator on a Renault Master van; I found it that evening when I saw light coming from inside the door through the various gaps between the door panels.
Same here; was doing plugs, coils, and in this case, valve cover gaskets. When I went to do the front one (transverse V6, front edge is up against nearly everything from the fan to the frame), the socket I had thought I had securely on the bolt went *boop* and fell down in the front, somewhere. I needed it, so I sorta figured out where it went (it landed kind of inside the bumper cover, but not where I could reach under and just get it. Ended up finding/seeing it and taking a broom and a few strips of Gorilla Tape artfully placed on the handle to snag it and gingerly pull it up like a game of ‘Operation’. All good!
It ended up on the magnet of the flashlight I was using to look for it for 20 minutes.
Back in high school, a buddy of mine worked at a local mom-and-pop garage — the kind with grease-stained calendars, a coffee pot older than the cars, and a shop radio permanently tuned to classic rock. One night, the owner generously let me rent a bay and borrow some tools so I could tackle a few jobs on my ’81 Mustang. 255ci inline 6. Terrible engine.
Radiator cap was on the driver’s side of the radiator – had the cap off, after just having refilled the system. Was screwing around with the top hat bolts on the driver’s side…when somehow the ratchet slipped and the socket popped off. In cinematic slow motion, it traced a perfect arc through the air — a graceful, almost balletic flight — straight toward the open radiator cap.
Plunk.
Right into the depths of the radiator.
Cue the scramble. We tried fishing it out with a magnetic pickup tool, but it was just shy of long enough. Eventually, I had to pull the lower radiator hose and let the coolant cascade out like a sad waterfall just to retrieve the rogue socket.
Dropped a 10mm into the back and bottom area of the dash when replacing the OEM audio deck. No idea where it is. I don’t hear any rattling. Probably still there. Not tearing out the dash to get it. (Maybe if I get the heater core replaced.) Went to Ace for a new one.
Dropped a few pieces of non-metal stuff (meaning, couldn’t retrieve with a magnet) while replacing a headlight. Got them back but scuffed up my arm reaching down for them.
I don’t have time to read all the other comments, but my guess is that it is in the dryer this coming Saturday when you finally get around to that pile of dirty laundry you have been stepping over.
I have 2 examples for you:
Many small sockets fall somehow under the steering rack, as there is an indentation in the subframe just big enough to hold a socket, I found mine when i worked there the second time.
Seecond example: I lost a flip phone that way, in a very tiny boxster of all things, somehow it got wedged between the seat and the center tunnel, I found it 6 months later(after I changed the phone number and carrier).
I’m also lucky to find tools. Claw hammer in my houses crawlspace, very very large adjustable pliers in my hottub enclosure, screw driver in the garage attic.
But my brother is the big winner. He found a loaded magazine from a firearm between the seat and center counsel of the used car they just bought for his wife. 9mm.
These things don’t disappear forever.
A couple of years ago I had a metal tire iron for a bike strangely disappear in the garage. A few months later, we had to roll start the old Jeep on a byway pullout when the battery suddenly failed to the point it wouldn’t even jump start, and the tire iron fell out of the front bumper where my then 2 year old had hidden it.
Lol. That is so perfect. Kids and the ideas that run through their heads are hilarious in hindsight, but in the immediate very aggravating.
So much creativity, used in such strange ways (to adults)
Another favorite:
“do you know where the car key went?”
“the cleaning fairy took it”
Had a Gerber pocket knife, put it in small day pack and went kayaking. Was missing when unpacked at end of day. Emptied the pack, turned it upside down, shook it, ran fingers allover the the inside. Nothing. Three years later I left a banana in the pack in summer; it fermented. Washed out the pack in the tub, drained it, hung it upside down in the shower to drain, and the knife falls out. Mystical.
you’ve found the pack that leads to Narnia.
No problem – just pick up the scion and shake until it falls out.
Kinda related, working in commercial building controls, the amount of tools you find above a drop ceiling is amazing. I’ve found screwdrivers, wire cutters, no end of wire nuts, when accessing equipment above the ceiling tiles.
Not a socket, but back in high school, I lost one of those solar-powered Radio Shack scientific calculators. (Nerd alert!) I looked everywhere for it, including (what I thought was) every crack and crevice in the ’77 Gran Fury I was driving at the time. So, you can imagine my surprise when, several years (and many interior cleanings) later, I was cleaning out the car to trade it and found that calculator wedged between the passenger-side seat track and door sill.