broken needle...lost tip
 

grrr.....broke a needle stitching face masks.....now I can not find the broken tip! Looked everywhere.....where do they go? Looked on the floor, looked on the cabinet, checked the mask, did a deep cleaning of the bobbin area.....checked my chair...where do those things go. I really like to find all the pieces of a broken needle as I have a dog and don't want him to get it in a paw....

It is so tiny no telling where it went. Use a vacuum on the floor to keep the dog safe. That's about all you can do.

The magnet pick up tool is good for finding little metal things. I have found a needle tip before with one.

Is it *inside* the mask? Oh, sorry, I see now that you checked it.

I second the tip to get a magnet and run it all around your area. It's possible it went flying 10 feet or so, too - that's happened to me.

Those needle tips can get into places that are not good. I had to replace a bobbin assembly for a lady that broke a needle and couldn't find the tip. It made a groove in the metal and the machine wouldn't pick up the bobbin thread once that groove got pretty big. That didn't take a long time either. When I removed the bobbin assembly, the needle tip fell out. It was not cheap to replace that part. Keep looking!

Check the clothes you were wearing. I have found hand sewing needles hidden in the cuffs of my jeans before!

Just be so careful t hat you hunt for it until you find it. We all know the danger of a broken needle. When I was a kid, we are talking many moons ago, my mom lost one didn't find it until she leaned up on her knee. Several surgeries later they were still unable to retrieve it. It showed up on x-ray but they were never able to get it out. Please be very careful.

Did you find it? When I break a needle, I try to tape the pieces to a piece of paper just to verify that I found all of it.

Were you leaning close to the machine when it broke? Any chance it flew up into your hair or (scary thought) you inhaled it?

Just in case anyone thinks this is impossible to do without knowing about it, I recently read an article about a teenaged boy who underwent heart surgery and the doctors found a pin he had unknowingly inhaled. It seems he likes to tailor his own clothes, had several pins in his mouth, inhaled one and they think it traveled to his heart. Yet another example of what not to do.