trying it on

Checking that whatever it is retaining the cranks on whatever I'm riding hasn't been amongst my regular safe-to-ride checks, but will be from now on after the left-hand crank arm on the sparebike objected to the recent increased usage and started waggling plaintively on the way in this morning. When I stopped to see what was happening it simply fell off. I unfortunately trundled off and bought some normal crank-retaining bolts at lunchtime without peering closely at the protruding BB spindle, which has a protruding male thread, like the bike up in the loft which I still need to get round to dismantling at some point prior to getting it repainted and refitted. I similarly thought I had an old-style crank-nut-capable crank-extractor tool somewhere, but this turned out to not be the case. My pliers were the only thing capable of getting at the recessed nut but were incapable of gripping tightly enough to remove the driveside nut in order to replace the BB with a spare one I hoarded around this time last year, so I resigned myself to walking in tomorrow as it was too late to attempt to get into the loft to see if there was a spare matching nut sitting around anywhere near the old frame.