To drop the tiny brake bleed screw off a Shimano road lever onto a patio of broken slabs and pebbles, the day before the bike leaves for france.
I decided to bleed my brakes on the lawn. Once*.
Try sweeping the area with a strong magnet. Fridge magnet, old hard drive, whatever you have to hand. *It's saved me a few times.
What diggery says. I worked on my bike on the gravel "patio" (once!). Had to sweep the area with the base of magnetic parts tray, picked up the screw eventually.
Glad you found it! I lost the tiny screw for my wolf tooth tanpan while building up my gravel bike. Eventually found it in the bottom of the bin amongst sawdust after two searches.
When I was a teenager, I had a summer job in a factory that had huge extractor fans to suck waste out, basically a giant vacuum cleaner. Except they would sometimes block up and if the fan got stalled, the motor would burn out. So, if the system stopped working, the first thing to do was to check if the fan was spinning or not. Except it was too noisy to hear, so there was a hole punched in the fan casing and you'd just poke a stick in to see if the fan was spinning or not. So, one day, the extractor stopped working and the foreman couldn't find a stick handy to poke into the hole. So he stuck his finger in instead...
Every time I do something stupid, I think of old Stumpy and I feel better about myself.
Used to live in a flat with a decking patio, just big enough gaps between to allow Allen keys and bolts through, but too narrow to allow a magnetic rescue or such.
Did this with a torx key on a balcony in Madeira last year, luckily I'd just finished fitting the last rotor bolt after I built the bike. It was the only one of the set I'd actually used
We stayed in one of the Glentress pods in 2021. Over the week we completed the STW lockdown jigsaw except for one final piece that fell between the slats by the door. Buggeration.
However, I did find a brake pad pin in the gravel at home last week. Yippee
Two day before the 24hr World Champs last year I decided that my rear hub wasn't quite as smooth as it could be. Lovely warm sunny day, nice picnic table in the park, tools out, wheel apart. Slightly stiff cartridge bearing. They are serviceable, just have pop the centre bit out, which can take a bit of a whack to achieve. It did come out, bearings everywhere, in the grass.
After a good couple of hours I'd found all but two🙈 It kind of worked, but definitely wasn't an improvement and was relegated to spare wheel. No spares anywhere in town
Whenever I drop a little part it's always twice as far away as expected and in the opposite direction you'd think it would go, I once found one of those little plastic cable cover screws from my XT shifter under the old shed when taking it down, how it got that far under is a mystery, I usually drop something non magnetic 90% of the time and randomly find it without looking for it weeks later, it's like a garden fairy is messing with me.
