Lost ring

Today I was changing a spark plug on a 4.6L Romeo engine with coil on plug. As the story goes my wedding ring fell off and slid down the bore in the cylinder head that the spark plugs live in. It managed to fit between the spark plug and the bore wall with the top of the ring level with the top of the part of the spark plug that the socket turns. The pictures below make it look not too bad, the reality of it was that it was cold outside and the hole it fell into was the second from the front on an Econoline van. I could not even tell if it was in there until I forced a camera through the maze of stuff on top of the engine to take a picture. It took four hours to get it out. I tried putting grease on the socket to get the ring to stick to it, it just about worked but would always fall back in. I tried dental picks, mechanics wire, snare wire. Gold doesn’t stick to magnets. The solution was to grind a socket so that it’s outside diameter was less than the inside diameter of the ring so that I could remove the spark plug then use a pick to remove the ring.