Engagement Ring stuck in vent near windshield

My fiancé had her ring on for less than 5 minutes. I said, “It seems a little loose.” She shook her hand and it went flying and lodged between the windshield and the defrost vent. Well I just got a small endoscopic camera and tool to try and get it out and that ring is not in there. I notice an opening to a hole and must be for defrost. It must have fallen in there. What’s the best way to get it out?! Help! Tysm in advance. Smh

First, make sure it didn’t fall somewhere else in the cabin.It could have rebounded and lodge itself under the seats or on the carpet. Next, take out the cabin air filter under the glove box and check inside the duct work with your camera.If you are lucky, it will be there shining at you.
This video explains how to remove the cabin ait filter

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If Corolla’s suggestions don’t yield success, and I hope they DO, you’ll need to start some disassembly. Ask the guy at the parts window at your dealership for an “exploded view” diagram of the area in question. Those are a huge help in figuring out how to disassemble and reassemble dash areas as well as other things.

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Like I said before, others have had good luck with their scope, but I have never found it a useful tool. Just the other day I was using it inside a wall and just found it unhelpful. So at any rate just because you don’t see it on the scope doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not there. You do need to narrow the possibilities though and then I think with a diagram, you will be under the dash and pulling the defrost duct off. I suspect it fell down the duct and into the hose connected to it.

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Maybe try bumping the lower plastic in the duct system to see if you hear a rattle that might be a ring. I f I heard that rattle woul look how easy it is to remove and access, or dremel off a nice size hole get the ring and hillbilly patch it , gorrilla tape or some plastic bond.

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Maybe you can suck it out from where it fell in using a shop vac. You may have to invent an attachment so it fits the opening to provide maximum suction. Empty the vac’s holding tub first of course.

worse case, you’ll have to remove the evap and heater core.

Labor for removing evap core: 6 hours
for removing heater core: 1.5 hours

To get to the ring, seems pretty likely the labor involved will be less than 1.5 hours. Skip going to the movie, and have at it. Or pay the shop labor fee, $150-$200 or so. Not that big of deal.

Congratulations to both of you on your engagement btw!! :slight_smile:

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The unlikeliness of that ring flying into the vent reminds me of the time I was testing a brand new and very expensive prototype transistor. I soldered three wires to the leads to aid in the testing. While positioning it on the test fixture two of the wires somehow flipped around and stuck into the AC power strip …

Was that an NPN or PNP transistor? Not that it matters, so to bring it back slowly to cars, we had an electronic shop teacher, we had metal stools and worked on the Devry circuit boards, tv’s and whatever, when somebody got shocked he would guess ac or dc and the voltage and was usually correct.So in mechanic shop we would take a charged ignition capacitor, toss it to a newby and laugh when he would catch it and get a jolt, ahhh the good old days.

I was at my desk and somebody asked about my ring. I said it was a bypass ring and I liked it. He asked to see it and I wondered if there would be some kind of trick going on. I slid it across the desk and he picks it up. “That’s just a lock washer.” Yup. 11 cents at any hardware store. I figured I could replace it easy enough.

I’m surprised no one mentioned having the windshield removed so you could fish into the defroster duct easily.

I hope that was a joke . . . ?

Professional glass installers have told me it’s sometimes not possible to remove a glued-in-place windshield without actually damaging it

The other thing is that it is likely not at a reachable point through the top of the defrost vent and I suspect that there are fins that restrict access also. Like I said though I suspect it has dropped down into the flex duct itself to the lowest point. Kinda like if you ever dropped anything down your floor vent at home and tried to get it out again.