The worst part about it is that the little missing part(s) is still there...laughing at you, silently taunting you, watching your every move.
I do my construction work in two areas, one is at the kitchen table which sits on an area rug over a hardwood floor. I have spent hours over time on my hands and knees searching and eventually finding. The other area is my bare concrete basement floor where lost items should be easy to find...but they are not. Concrete floors simply provide a better bouncing surface.
A few months ago, I had reason to replace the springs that I had previously removed in a few Peco turnouts. I set up a card table and chair in the foyer with its hardwood floor, so that I could find any lost springs. Fortunately, that proved unnecessary.
I am still haunted 10 years later by a missing fisherman who was last seen standing on an embankment under a bridge. Granted, I did not drop this part, but he did go missing, never to be found. This past summer, as I demolished my old layout, I was convinced that he would be found, but no luck. I do have a feline of interest, but she ain't talkin'.
Rich
Alton Junction
Hey, Dave, welcome to the club! I was in HO from about 1956 to 1993, with time out for O scale in the '60s. I went back into O in '93 because it's big enough to SEE! However, being bigger, any detail that should be there but isn't sticks out like a sore thumb--at lease to me. Since there's not a chance in a million that I'll ever be in a position to build another layout, I decided to build turn of the (20th) century equipment. My second project was a quartet of 34' boxcars, two from prototype drawings in MR and two of them freelanced--but with authentic detailing. About three years ago I had to quit for a while, since my eyesight took a turn for the worse--after losing three air brake retainer valves to patterned "tile" floor covering and hundreds of odd places they could go to hide.
Well, as I told a friend this afternoon, when he was complaining about Old Age, it's better than the alternative--plus, they shoot horses, don't they? P.S. I now have a new and improved magnifying bench lamp and reading glasses, and I'm working on a long project for display. Never say die!
Deano
Not too long ago somebody suggested putting your sprue into a Ziplock bag before cutting anything off. The theory was that if the part did fly off it would be trapped by the bag. I never tried it.
Every time my wife tells me to let the cleaning ladies into my workshop I cringe at the thought that the lost parts will now never be recovered.
Dave
I'm just a dude with a bad back having a lot of fun with model trains, and finally building a layout!
Years ago, I had a Star Wars action figure on my desk. He fell off once and this little antenna on his helmet came off. I looked high and low for it, but it went off to the same land as the tiny screw I dropped the other night when I was replacing a coupler.
Three years later, I'm moving out of that apartment. I was making the last pass to make sure I hadn't left anything behind, and across the room, a good 15 feet away, I see a tiny little black thing laying on the floor. It was that antenna, all 5/8ths of an inch of it. How...how....it never got sucked up in a vaccuum or swept up or, geez, anything?
Why would you expect small parts to be findable if they are launched into the nether world when it is a scientific fact that dryers cause larger items (every 3rd sock on average) to completely disappear only to later emerge as lids to Tupperware containers of a size you don’t own.
Andre
I surely don't find everything on my grey carpet, but I do find a lot.
I have abandoned the idea that you can predict a bounce. Nope. Doesn't happen. It's OK to look where you think it bounced to, but it will never be there.
What works for me is to let the part be found.
Give it a try, Luke.
Ed
Sorry Dave, I laughed out loud. But I hear you. My floor is a beige carpet. I have done all those things you mention trying to find that part that bounced off the bench and then bounced off myself and then hit the floor and who knows how many times it bounced of the floor. And if it had glue on it maybe it didn't even make it to the floor. Most of the time I am able to find the parts but sometimes I find myself searching my scraps to manufacture the part that has been taken by the power of the floor. My eyes are not what they used to be and I have thought about moving up to HO scale. But from what you said you have more difficulty than I do. I wish you well.
Modeling a railroad hypothetically set in time.
The tiny parts that slip from your fingers or tweezers, or go flying away unexpectedly from the sprue cutter? They just disappear!
I am building an old kit, Silver Streak "Golden Spike" series mechanical reefer. A plastic kit, not one of the Silver Streak wood and metal kits. There was a bit of a craze for plastic kits with separately applied parts back then, as a rebellion against the shake the box kits -- first the Kurtz Kraft (later Cannonball Car Shops) PS-1 boxcar, then the Golden Spike mechanical reefers. It took another decade or more before other manufacturers did this kind of kit in plastic. It is somewhat arbitrary which details are cast in place or separately applied, and some of the separately applied ones are very tiny indeed.
So I am just on step 3 of the kit instructions and have already lost a plug door handle and a fuel tank cap. They are somewhere on the floor (old fashioned linoleum, tan with what looks like brown and white painted streaks -- the worst possible background for finding stuff). Somewhere down on that same floor there also are dozens of Kadee coupler springs, some Durango Press gondola stake pockets, screws to the valve gear of a brass locomotive or two, jewels to lost wax brass castings of marker lights, metal grab irons, lift rings, air hoses, coupler cut levers. You name it, it's down there somewhere.
So .... How come I never find ANY of it? I cast a strong light on the floor looking for tiny shadows. Nyet. I carefully sweep with a fine broom (and check the broom thoroughly). Nyet. Today I was on my hands and knees wearing an optivisor with a flashlight. Nyet. Heck I'd feel victorious if I ended up crushing the darn things with my shoes. But nyet.
True I am fighting a losing battle with glaucoma (which I why I finally figured it was now or never on this Silver Streak kit) but even so, I have always had about a 0% success rate with any of this stuff. I could open a reasonably well stocked hobby shop with just the stuff on my floor if I could only find it.
OK, so ... where do these things go? To heaven (or the other place)? Have I accidentally been modeling with my mouth open and swallowed them? Do spiders rush out and grab them and take them back into the dark corners?
I am too many decades removed from college but I seem to recall some wise man at a lecture pit saying that matter cannot be destroyed. I am here to say I believe this is incorrect, provided it is part of a model railroad kit.
No point to this other than generic venting.
Now ... on to step 4. Wish me luck.
Dave Nelson