To make a short story long, the rule one should always follow in a situation like this is " The chance of your finding it decreases with the amount of effort you spend looking for it and the importance of the part Furthermore the part will always turn up in the most obvious location you can't think of "
Sunday as I was putting my exhaust and axles back in, I stretched one of four new donuts like a rubber band to clear the hangers with a giant pry bar, and it suddenly flew off into nowhere and vaporized.
Not that it mattered, i could have reused my old ones, but for a compulsive individual like me, it drove me nuts and I ransacked the my driveway for 3 hours looking for it.
What followed belies the fact that I have a brain. I shook my car front and back, jumped on the bumpers, convinced that the donut was lodged in some ledge of the suspension or undercarraige. That must have amused the neighbors! Then I got into everyone of my other three cars and backed them of the driveway and proceeded to walk down the driveway in matrix like fashion convinced that math would yield the Donut. No luck. At 6 PM my wife called me in for dinner.
That was the end of the search.
The next morning as I left for work I absent mindedly gazed at my christmas lights and saw the donut hanging tantalizingly on one of them in a bush next to the driveway and the car I was working on.
I've been through this scenario 1000 times. Once I ransacked my house and garage and the laundry looking for 2 days looking my Car Keys. Where did they turn up? In my engine compartment where I left them as I got out one afternoon to tweak some obscure setting.
Another time I lost a valuable corner seal on an RX7 engine I was rebuilding. I searched for it for vain for three hours all over the garage floorand found it stuck to the adhesive of the envelope for the other seals.
Finally there are the wrenches or obscure tools that pronounce their absence by missing slots on ratchet wracks or socket bars...I swear I never know where they go, but somehow they always turn up after long searches and I pride myself on still having every socket I bought with my first Craftsmen tool set in 1981...........