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We've all been on our hands and knees, scraping every inch of the rug in hopes of recovering that one awesome or irreplaceable bit. Some of us have probably pulled up heating vent covers and jammed our arms into the mysterious nether regions of our homes to feel out that piece that bounced into the darkness below. Recently, I may have stepped into the realm of crazy person with my latest recovery effort. My story begins, as many good stories do, with cheesecake. I was having desert at the kitchen table while I fooled around with some necron immortals I had blue tacked together before painting. As I'm stuffing my face, the dog is dutifully guarding the floor space nearby to ensure no crumbs of food invade this otherwise immaculate surface. Because I eat like a savage, crumbs of crust are flying all over the place and the dog is vacuuming them up with his face as fast as they fall. This is when one of my immortal's heads drops off and becomes just another food-like substance for the dog to clean up. I crawled around on the floor, I shined a flashlight into the nearby vent, and I brushed off the table, chair, and my clothes. No luck. It was obvious where the head went. My girlfriend could see my mind working feverishly, as I contemplated the alimentary canal of eight month old puppy dogs, and she insisted that I not even think about it, but it was too late. I simply said, "If I'm patient, I can get this head back." Well, several days have passed and no head. Other larger things have appeared, and I'm afraid the lonely Immortal head may have slipped through my fingers (so to speak). On a positive note, walking around my backyard is no longer the minefield it used to be.

So, that's my tale of madness. I'd like to hope I would never fall this far down the rabbit hole again, but when the bit recovery fever strikes you, you never know where you'll find yourself when the haze lifts. Anybody else go a bit mad? Someone please help me to feel less the lunatic...

I swear on my life I keep losing the same head. Its the unhelmeted chaos marine head from the Chaos Landraider kit. Its the one with the cross bars running over his scalp down to his mouth filter. I was going to put it on my renegage commander, but it disappeared. I searched through both of my massive unorganized bitz boxes to no avail. It soon possesed me to take everything out of my hobby area and organize it. After no luck with this search I reached into my pocket for my Android to get one off ebay, and it was in my pocket. Ive lost it several times since (I found out I had no glue to secure it) so now the head resides in a small baggie duck-taped to my hobby table.


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And no, you are not a lunatic. None of us are! Our hobby is more important than our self respect!!! Never give in!!!!

At one point I had a hand-held "bits vacuum" that I only used to try to find stuff in an old shag carpeted room I gamed in.

I found several bits I don't think I ever lost...

Ha! When in doubt, check your pockets.

Sieving your way though poo is pretty extreme.

Whilst tilling my kitchen floor last month I found a fantasy goblin head in a dark corner. I am 100% sure its not mine, the only possible answer is it belongs to the previous house owner. Now I'm excited about what else I can find.

Wow, finding other people's bits is something that's never happened to me. The previous owners of my home only left behind trash and a pipe that I'm fairly certain was not intended for tobacco use...

Wow, we've all been here before then! I once drove to the shops to buy a torch so i could lay it on my carpet with the lights off to find some heads i dropped by their shadow :-) I spent an hour teling myself they couldn't have bounced far! after i gave up i then spent $15.00 on ebay re buying them :-( only to have my gf pick one up from next to the leg of the coffee table some 4 metres away! how the?.....

and in reference to finding scores in your house, here's one you'll like :-) I recently removed 2 brick arches from my double brick cottage which left a couple of bricks missing from my lounge room wall, no problems as i was plastering the front and back lounge walls anyway, so i thought it would be a cool idea to have an old Dark Angles captain i painted years ago watch over us and protect the home! so into the brick cave he went, whoever tears down the wall or plaster in years to come will find him resoloute! I have a pic on my old phone of him in there (i should try and post it)

NF09

I have actually cleaned my room and ripped the carpet to find a bit.

CLEANED YOUR ROOM! Oh my lord you must have wanted that bit! :-)

I did, I didnt want to get another apthecary. and orse, it was under my futon.

Now if your futon was in another room? then we'd have a conspiracy about phase shifting!

mmmmyes, indeed.

I've never torn up the carpet, but I did vacuum a rug and then sift through the vacuum bag. Got dust everywhere, then, vacuumed again.

My son lost a Dragon Prince torso a few months back. Irritated I ordered a set of them from Hoard O Bits to replace it.

Guess what I found behind my computer tower the other day when I was cleaning the inside of it?

OP- That is literally insane! You must have a very patient girlfriend, too

@RiTides- Well, It's not like she helped ...and, as to my sanity, I had to police the stuff anyway. Just a quick squeeze while it's in the bag and we're done. So, y'know, totally sane.

I've lost a few bits and found them in entirely different areas where I dropped them. I have never had this happen to ANYTHING necron, but it constantly happens to my chaos marines and daemons. I'm thinking the warp takes them and they just appear somewhere else in the same area. I wonder if maybe some of them have somehow teleported into the apartment upstairs....

I'd root thru some doggy doo if it was over something like a combi-melta that runs for $7-8 on feebay. Or if it was OOP and rare.

Then again I have no dignity left. My 2 sons saw to that.

I used tape on a pencil to retrieve a shield from beneath my deck, it had fallen through the cracks.

Years ago at one of the homes that I currently own, one of my daemonette's claws (pewter) fell off of my hobby table, bounced right into the intake vent of my old gas heater, right into pilot light flue and into the bowls of the heater itself. you know what the odds of something bouncing into a hole the size of a quarter? It was maddening.

Instead of just ordering another part from GW (pre 2004) and doing the smart thing, I turned off the gas, crawled underneath the house, opened the access panel and retrieved that bit from the heating unit. Just a dumb move as it took almost a half of a day just to get things back to normal.

But I did get my claw back

Nerdfest09, I really think you should haave included a 40k novel with the mini. Just so if in a few thousand years someone digs up your house, we will all have been reading parables about a heroic soldier who worships a god called the emperor and including shrines in our homes to watch over us.

Fortunately I operate on a cold basement floor. Makes spotting bits far easier as A.) you can hear where it lands and B.) the bare flat surface prevents it from beings tuck in rug treads (the ultimate devourer of lost bits).

Nerdfest09, I really think you should haave included a 40k novel with the mini. Just so if in a few thousand years someone digs up your house, we will all have been reading parables about a heroic soldier who worships a god called the emperor and including shrines in our homes to watch over us.

I agree, folks really should put together more bogus time capsules in order to screw with future archeologists.

Fortunately I operate on a cold basement floor. Makes spotting bits far easier as A.) you can hear where it lands and B.) the bare flat surface prevents it from beings tuck in rug treads (the ultimate devourer of lost bits).

With the necron head, it was less the floor surface and more the wiggly puppy dog that was the problem. It's like having my very own facebiter squig.

The whole 'missing bits' thing reminded me of something I pondered about a while ago

There is one thing I never really understood about GW stores, considering that they have been doing the hobby for years, and they are fully knowledgeable of the fact that their plastic parts are grey, why do they insist on using grey carpets in their stores? I mean, you drop something in a GW you are not going to find it, the carpet is almost the same shade as the plastic for feth's sake.

Leigen_Zero wrote:The whole 'missing bits' thing reminded me of something I pondered about a while ago

There is one thing I never really understood about GW stores, considering that they have been doing the hobby for years, and they are fully knowledgeable of the fact that their plastic parts are grey, why do they insist on using grey carpets in their stores? I mean, you drop something in a GW you are not going to find it, the carpet is almost the same shade as the plastic for feth's sake.

Obviously, the carpet is made by GW themselves, with left-overs from the castings.

The guys who do the WWPD podcast had a funny story about one of their guys working on a Flames of War Armored Train model and dropping a tiny (FoW is 15mm) chimney piece between boards on a deck. The guy had to crawl under and root through who-knows-what to find a tiny pewter piece in decades of debris.

He did find it though!

A personal life lesson that took me a lot of pain to learn: Do not hobby on the couch.

My couch is this ginormous overstuffed leather monster with built in cushions. Now, that little space between the cushions is frightening enough, but imagine if these are fat, foot thick, non-removable cushions. It gets even worse in that mine apparently doesn't have a bottom, it just goes into the body of the couch.

So after losing a particularly choice bit down that crack I decided to upend my couch and cut giant holes in the bottom of it. The thin fabric on the bottom of the couch has been completely removed and a good deal of the wood work has been cracked or bent in an effort to find these long lost bits.

The majority of them, however, remain unrecovered to this day. I have no clue where they could possibly BE inside that bloody couch.

I've also literally combed half the carpet in my hobby room with my fingers. It was painful and burny but I got my damn bit.

You guys need this thing:

http://www.micromark.com/parts-catching-apron,8108.html

You will totally look like a dork, but think about all the hours you'll save yourself because all you have to do is look down

My number 1 tip to anybody that has any say over this:

Make sure your hobby room has no carpet. I have no idea how many pieces are lost forever in that thing.

A quick helper for finding small bits in carpet is to take a nylon stocking, hold it over the hose of your vacuum, and sweep across the floor.

d-usa wrote:My number 1 tip to anybody that has any say over this:

Make sure your hobby room has no carpet. I have no idea how many pieces are lost forever in that thing.

A quick helper for finding small bits in carpet is to take a nylon stocking, hold it over the hose of your vacuum, and sweep across the floor.

This plus a 1000! I used to lose everything in my bedroom carpet. So now I moved to my garage and everything is better, although some bits do get lost for a while since they blend in with the concrete.