The lost nut

[Ignatzcatz]

Whilst I do like the hearty noise that emanates out of the exhaust on my SSE I'm also a rather keen on a bit of prog rock and you can't really decipher much when you're being herded along at 50 mph down the roadworks where the authorities are installing smart motorways. WTF is a smart motorway anyway? So I would rather hear some Hackett and Howe not to mention some Haken and even Van Hertsen. To this end I thought I should purchase a CD player for the car. It is slightly difficult to get hold of a CD player these days as most devices only feature Bluetooth, smart phone connection and sockets for MP3 players. But I'm old school with vast quantities of CD's (I've binned the cassettes you'll be pleased to hear) so a CD player was what I wanted. Onto the web I goes for something fairly powerful but without too many gizmoes, and the result was a very good deal on a Sony unit from that well known bicycle shop that used to have stuff for cars - Halfords. Ordered it on line and picked it up from the shop in an hour. Excellent.
Now the story starts. Got it back from the shop, out the box and stuck it in the hole in the dash. On the back of the unit is a threaded boss for a M4 screw which I wanted to use instead of just bending the tabs over on the mounting sleeve that slides over the unit. Rear mounting the piece makes the fitment much more secure. And rear mounting has always been one of my favourite positions. Unfortunately the existing bracket in my 911 had been welded in just a gnats thingy to the right and didn't align with the boss on the CD player. So, easy peasy, just make up a simple bracket to compensate for this misalignment. Back under the dash bolt up this little bracket with a couple of M5's and as I was working slightly blind I dropped one of the nuts. I looked across to the off side well but I couldn't find it, looked all around the pedal area, still couldn't find it, started pulling up the mats, still no joy. I was determined to find this errant hardware so after scouring everywhere possible above floor area I started really getting serious. All the centre console came out with all the wiring and it was only when I pulled back the middle carpet exposing the pipes and cables right down in the central part of the car did I discover the bloody thing. I still couldn't pick it up, I had to get my little magnet to lift it up and out of the depths of my 911. Now how the hell did it ever get to fall down there. An M5 nut isn't exactly tiny but somehow it found it's evil way.
Regretfully my problems had not ended there because although the hook ups to the rear speakers were all OK there was no sound from the front mids and tweeters. Stripping out both door panels I discovered the wires had become sliced at some point in time. Feeding new wiring through the door jam area into the door is one of those jobs from hell. Where the door opens it effectively covers the exit from the body making it incredibly difficult to feed the wire through. I ended up soldering the wires onto a bent piece of welding rod and very gingerly working it through to the inner door.
So what I thought would be an hours job at the most took me two bloody days. However I celebrated with an inaugural playing of Wind and Wuthering, loud, in the garage, with the windows up. Joy.
So a small moral of this little tale is never let your holes be exposed, you never know what may drop into them.