lost nuts!

[JRH02]

The first vehicle engine I rebuilt was a a 305 V6 for my pickup. I was 17. It was an expensive rebuild with a bore, pistons, crank kit, etc. But I had an oil leak at the cam galley cover under the intake manifold. I pulled it apart and replaced the gasket but when reassembling I was missing a bolt for the intake manifold. I couldn't find it anywhere but no problem, I had one that would work. Fired it up and all was good until diarrhea blasted out of the breathers. That missing bolt had fallen off the grill in front of the windshield and into the cam galley and the cam pushed it through the water jacket. There is no welding of a cast iron block and no one would take the project. That was one really expensive Oops.

 

[CliffordK]

There are benefits of sweeper magnets.

That is unless a former housemate decided to just dump all his screws where he had parked, and some of them were stainless or brass.

 

[BravoXray]

Long ago, I bought a package of smaller zip closure bags (roughly without getting one and a tape measure they are 2”x 4”). Tgey work great for small parts to keep together, if need for larger parts you can use sandwich, quart or gallon bags—if won’t fit in a gallon bag, I figure I can see it. If I’m careful with the nags I can get several usages out of the same bag—sometimes I drop smaller bags of parts into a bigger bag if multiple projects in the same general area.

When I disassembled my 70 Nova, I used dozens of zip-lock bags of several different sizes to keep things organized. I put a tag in each one with what the parts were for. Now that it's nearly all back together, I have a lot of good used bags.
The ones from McMaster-Carr are good ones, come in a few different sizes and I have a big supply of those.