Your best roadside tool find

I haven't found anything on the road that I can recall, but some years ago about 35 or 40 years, I'd had a fair bit of work done on my house about 6 different tradies, involved. When the work was all finished and they had left, as I cleaned up I found a Makita battery drill it was the 9v one with the long battery fitted into the hand grip, no charger just the drill and battery. i waited a while expecting the owner to call back, but he never did. So I went and bought myself a charger, I still use it today. I've had to replace the battery a few times, but it still goes well.

I still think my best find is a local heavy steel fabrication shop, that the owner is quite happy for me to rummage through his scrap skip and take whatever I want, some of the pieces are too big and heavy for me to lift even with my mate helping me.
 
I've been pretty lucky in discoveries, I have found the usual assortment of basic hand tools, a pistol in a pelican case back in the late 90's which was laying in the middle of a country road, and the best was in the mid 80's I found a wallet with several hundred dollars in it. Unfortunately I knew the jerk it belonged to and returned it to him, sometimes honesty doesn't pay. :p
 
I found a new car carrier in the middle of the road. It had no hitch on the front so
I'm thinking it fell off a truck. I called the state police and they was not interested.
They said keep it... I had to tie it fast to my bumper to get it home...
 
When I rode my bike everywhere, I found lots of tools. A dozen or so 1/2 and 9/16 wrenches, lots of sockets, a decent pair of 10 in. Channellock pliers and a matched set of Diamond tool adjustable (Crescent) wrenches (10 and 12 in.). More recently I found a new HF tool set (sockets, ratchets, etc.) scattered on a freeway on-ramp and a nice pair of Serengeti sunglasses in the case at an I-5 rest stop.

Like they say, "keep your eyes on the road".
 
Nogoingback said:
I used a pair of vice grips which I clamped to a clutch cable I was adjusting, and then forgot them. A year
later the same car came back and I found them still clamped to the cable. Still have those pliers.
Click to expand...

I did exactly the same thing on one of my many VW buses. Those are some tenacious pliers, still have 'em.
 
I walk my dog every day and as there are several parks around here there's lots RV's and traffic. They drop all kinds of weird stuff like parts and hardware. But one day I was doing one of my many loops and looked under a bush and something didn't look right. I saw it was a leather form fitting camera case and pulled it out thinking it was empty, but it wasn't. There was a Fugifilm xt20 camera in perfect shape. I think somebody was taking pics of the groves came back and put the camera one the top of the car while they loaded up and drove away. It fell off and rolled under a bush. It had been the for at least a month and the thing that saved it was the nice case. I put ads and got calls for other makes, but not that one. Pretty expensive camera.
 
I didn’t stop to pick it up wasn’t tool but it was coke machine.I regret not stopping
 
Found a 5 gal pail full carpenters tools for hanging doors and locks etc. Placed a "found" ad locally and put a few posters up and at the local post office, but no calls. Still use some of the tools. I drive about an hour each way on the freeway daily to work and back. A couple times came across rolls of coax cable. If I stopped for every tie down I saw, I could have filled a pickup truck already!
 
Guy driving way to fast up a hill hits a bump and off flies a small snow blower. Does a near perfect 720 and lands with just a bent wheel. Waited 20 minutes for him to come back and then said thank you and drove off. Still works nice 7 years later.
 
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