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then its like 'eh....3 screws is good enough'

Pro tip: When you drop a small thing quickly look down. Takes practice because you have to do it so fast, has to be a reflex.

You'll often catch it on the bounce, and in any case, your ears are also pointed the right way.

What's up with this title?? Dropping something small and not finding it again is probably as close to a universal experience as possible

lay a flashlight on the ground aimed to where the thing fell, look for a shadow

I got one of those powerful rare earth magnets, so my lost screw percentage is way down, from 99% lost to only about 95% lost now!

Never seen again... Until you step on it barefoot.

This is why I always kept my cat around when I was working on stuff. He'd track the dropped screws for me. Of course he'd also occasionally jump onto the table and fuck up whatever I was working on but there's pros and cons to anything.

Newton's fourth law of motion states: "A small screw in an observed state will never dissappear." So, just keep your eye on it when you drop it and you'll be fine.

I made the mistake of having those color chips on my epoxy garage floor. Looks nice. Can't see anything. Perfect camouflage for small dropped parts.

Drop another in the same spot and watch where it goes.

Our feet evolved to provide the perfect angle for dropped objects to bounce in a quasi 90° angle and go hide themselves under whatever table/desk we were working in front of.

i don't even bother looking for those anymore. If i drop something tiny i just assume it slipped through the cracks in reality and will re-emerge at a random point in time, past or future

1. If you have a magnet, use that to find the screw
2. If you don't have a magnet, buy one immediately for the future, and then proceed to step 3
3. Look for it with your peripheral vision, which is better at spotting deviations to terrain and shapes than your primary vision. I don't remember the exact reason, but it has something to do with being able to spot predators out of the corner of our eyes.

Lay a flashlight on the floor.

In the horizontal beam of the flashlight, every mote of dust will cast a long shadow. Something as large as a tiny screw becomes easily visible.

I recently dropped a bearing and it rolled under my oven. Yeah that thing is fuckin gone.

Me and my friends call it the dice dimension.

As Louis Rossmann says, listen for it as it falls. Don't look for it. You'll always hear where it lands.

if it drops anywhere within 20ft of a low platform with as little as an inch gap beneath it, thats where it went. and you have to use a broom stick or similar to reach it

Now try it with a dropped 0201 resistor. Might as well be a speck of dust.

I was able to solder the 0201 LED on this (confirmed connectivity with a multimeter), but I had a little too much pressure on the tweezers with the resistor, and it flicked away into the void.

I saw somewhere a great name for those tiny screws and springs: pingfucks. Named after the sound they make immediately followed by the sound you make

skill issue

Depends on the size of the screw.

My bet is Tunnel Effect from Quantum Mechanics since it also shares the properties of the likelihood of it happenning being inverselly correlated with size and just making things cross some kind of high energy barrier without the need for the energy to actually go into it.