OutAtTheEdge
Member
So about an hour ago I was down in my shop switching scopes between a couple rifles. It is cold in my shop today, cold enough that I slipped into an old S&W branded hoodie before heading down there.
Now, I've got a lot of bench time in over the years, enough to know that you really have to be careful with all those little screws and springs and pins and such, especially when your hands are cold. But knowing a thing and doing it occasionally take divergent paths, which is a roundabout way of saying I dropped a scope ring screw. Now, I didn't think I dropped it, I knew darn well I dropped it, right out of my cold old fingers onto the floor, which is about as clean as your average workshop floor.
On hands and knees on the floor with a flashlight is, according to Roy Huntington, called the "gunsmith prayer position." I have been well-acquainted with this particular position for well into four decades now. Of course, anyone who has spent much time at all working on guns, knows that you don't just drop down right away. First you have to stand still and scan, starting with where you think the part fell, then slowly working out from there in all directions to a distance that is mostly improbable but still within the realm of possible, because sometimes those little parts can seriously bounce. If you're smart, you already have an EDC light on you, or at least within easy reach. I did not. So stepping carefully, I went and retrieved my favorite Streamlight Wedge.
Flashlight in hand, I assume the prayer position, and begin the task of crawling and looking, crawling and looking, and occasionally getting down into what my wife calls the "downward dog", so as to get a good look under benches and storage racks. As the search goes on, I begin looking in some less likely places, like bottom shelves and "way over there" by the furnace. I backtrack and recheck the more likely spots, and even resort to sweeping as the project takes on a desperate aspect. Along the way, I do find a few things I've missed in past searches, along with some stuff I didn't know I had dropped, but the ring screw remained at large.
At some point, I began to think it just wasn't going to get found, and perhaps giving up was the smart play. But not yet. So I kept it up, and as I went my mind started to wander, back to the many times I'd done this before, and to some of the incredibly weird places I had eventually found the fugitive bits and pieces. There was the spring that somehow bounced up and landed on a 2x4 support on the workbench, and the pin that rolled all the way across the shop and almost completely under a baseboard. But the most frustrating was the AR firing pin that rolled off the bench, eluding capture for weeks, until it finally turned up in an unused pocket of the shop apron I'd been wearing when.....
So, yeah, the screw was in the front pocket of my ratty old black hoodie with the S&W logo on it. And now I know where I'm gonna look first, if this ever happens again.
Which it will. Probably soon.
Now, I've got a lot of bench time in over the years, enough to know that you really have to be careful with all those little screws and springs and pins and such, especially when your hands are cold. But knowing a thing and doing it occasionally take divergent paths, which is a roundabout way of saying I dropped a scope ring screw. Now, I didn't think I dropped it, I knew darn well I dropped it, right out of my cold old fingers onto the floor, which is about as clean as your average workshop floor.
On hands and knees on the floor with a flashlight is, according to Roy Huntington, called the "gunsmith prayer position." I have been well-acquainted with this particular position for well into four decades now. Of course, anyone who has spent much time at all working on guns, knows that you don't just drop down right away. First you have to stand still and scan, starting with where you think the part fell, then slowly working out from there in all directions to a distance that is mostly improbable but still within the realm of possible, because sometimes those little parts can seriously bounce. If you're smart, you already have an EDC light on you, or at least within easy reach. I did not. So stepping carefully, I went and retrieved my favorite Streamlight Wedge.
Flashlight in hand, I assume the prayer position, and begin the task of crawling and looking, crawling and looking, and occasionally getting down into what my wife calls the "downward dog", so as to get a good look under benches and storage racks. As the search goes on, I begin looking in some less likely places, like bottom shelves and "way over there" by the furnace. I backtrack and recheck the more likely spots, and even resort to sweeping as the project takes on a desperate aspect. Along the way, I do find a few things I've missed in past searches, along with some stuff I didn't know I had dropped, but the ring screw remained at large.
At some point, I began to think it just wasn't going to get found, and perhaps giving up was the smart play. But not yet. So I kept it up, and as I went my mind started to wander, back to the many times I'd done this before, and to some of the incredibly weird places I had eventually found the fugitive bits and pieces. There was the spring that somehow bounced up and landed on a 2x4 support on the workbench, and the pin that rolled all the way across the shop and almost completely under a baseboard. But the most frustrating was the AR firing pin that rolled off the bench, eluding capture for weeks, until it finally turned up in an unused pocket of the shop apron I'd been wearing when.....
So, yeah, the screw was in the front pocket of my ratty old black hoodie with the S&W logo on it. And now I know where I'm gonna look first, if this ever happens again.
Which it will. Probably soon.
...Ben
