Gloom, Despair, and Agony on me!
Did you know that it's really hard to see a black plastic spacer in a black plastic monitor housing with no light? Ok, maybe it's just me...
I rotated the monitor until it sounded like the spacer was back on the end where the monitor stand attachment slots were located. Then I gently waggled it back and forth until I saw a little shadow zip past the slots. By gentler waggling I coaxed the spacer back to the area of the slots until I could see it (sort of...). It was lying about 2 inches below the slot it fell through - a slot that is about 6-8 mm tall. It took about 10-15 minutes to get it back there. Now what?
About an hour before I lost the spacer into the monitor, Amazon delivered my new FixIt toolkit.
I had almost cheaped out and bought just the bits and driver, but decided to get the whole kit. Good thing. The tweezers turned out to be a life saver. I inserted the tweezers through the slot (but they wouldn't fit in a way that they could open) and moved the spacer to line up with the largest slot, but I couldn't grab the spacer with the tweezers.
At this point the monitor is upright, the spacer is resting on a shelf that's horizontal (parallel to the floor) in this position. So The spacer is lying parallel to the floor, and the slot it went through is vertical (pointing at the ceiling). I thought I might be able to lay the monitor down on it's back and the spacer would lay over onto the bit of housing running from the bottom of the slot to the shelf. Then I might be able to tip the monitor and have the spacer slide out through the slot. That actually almost worked, but there was enough friction between the washer and the housing that it slid off sideways, and I almost lost it into the housing again. Tweezers to the rescue.
I puzzled over the next move for a while. Some angel must've whispered in my ear and I remembered I had some stiff 3M double sided tape. And a small flashlight.
Holding the monitor in one hand, the flashlight in my mouth, and the double-sided tape in the other hand, I pushed the tape through the slot and it touched the spacer (which was once again at a right angle to the slot). The spacer stuck to the tape, I pulled it up to the slot, grabbed it with the tweezers, but didn't have it good enough and the spacer squirted out of the tweezers when it hit the edge of the slot.
Moved the spacer back into position with the tweezers again. Pushed the double sided tape through the slot again and touched the spacer with a better contact patch this time. Pulled it up to the slot, got a good grip with the tweezers, turned the spacer parallel to the slot, and... it worked! Voila! Spacer extraction complete!
