Smoke in the Wires Oct 2015

Last year for the Halloween issue, I heralded the importance of the blood sacrifice in achieving solid mechanical
results. This year I’m dedicating this column to the lost. I’m not talking about tools destroyed in service. They
don’t count. If you have a carcass, it’s not really gone. Better yet, if it is a Craftsman carcass, Sears will replace it.
No, I’m telling ghost stories--stories about tools that are gone. Or are they?
What about the rattle from the dash that you’ve never resolved? Maybe it’s your 3/8 inch socket that hasn’t been
seen since you last worked on the wiper linkage. It is gone but it still haunts you and your car.
Last weekend I dropped a hex bit while
trying to detach the fiddly tach generator
that resides at the back of the engine and
is secured to the head with impossible to
access allen screws. The metallic bit hit
several things on the way down as
evidenced by the metallic ringing it made
on its journey to the netherworld.
Unfortunately, the last sound was not the
satisfying flat clink of it hitting concrete. I
have looked everywhere without finding
that bit. I even ran an inspection camera inside
the bell housing, under the theory that the bit had
bounced through the inspection port for the
flywheel. The bit has simply vanished into thin air.
Science tells us this cannot be so. Dictionary.com
details how matter cannot simply vanish under
ordinary circumstances in its definition of the law
of conservation of mass:
Smoke in the Wires October 2015 Page 22