Many moons ago in the before-times I worked in a small machine shop that specialized in making toy prototypes. One of the methods we used was what we called "ha

Many moons ago in the before-times I worked in a small machine shop that specialized in making toy prototypes. One of the methods we used was what we called "hammer engineering": go to a toy store, buy a bunch of toys, take them back to the shop, and bust them open with a hammer to extract the parts and recombine them. There were nuances: if we're prototyping something for an inventor trying to sell to Mattel, starting off with parts from Mattel toys kept the new tooling for custom parts to a minimum.