Swim In The Pain Of Retrieving A Lost Drill Bit From Deep Inside A Mini

You probably know this feeling. You drop something, a fastener, a socket, a shotgun shell into your engine bay. First you look. Can you see it? No. Then you stick one of those little magnet retriever things down where you think the object may have gone. It sticks to everything else, but you can’t pull your object back out. Shit. You look under the car. Did it bounce out? It did not. At this point, you have to ask,“Is it near anything that would be damaged by it? Can I just…Leave it in there?” You can’t. Welcome to Hell.

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In the case of this poor soul wrenching on a Mini, none of those considerations were necessary. They were fucked from the jump and they knew it. The car—almost the whole car—had to come apart. Let’s follow along:

Is the opening sequence of the video staged? Possibly. But I think we can let it slide because it’s hard to imagine that the rest of it, where the unnamed, uncredited mechanic removed pretty much everything including transmission and most of the electrical components to get to the little drill bit extension piece which had come to rest inside the timing chain cover. Absolute hell.

Be careful under there. I’d have been in there with the magnet thing for a week before I went this far.