I drive a tinker toy

From Old Blog: I should create a category just for off the wall ideas. This one certainly would fall under the category. It occurred to me... why don't we have large scale tinker toys / erector sets / construx / legos / your modular toy here? Basically a small number of primitive components that can be put together in progressively more complex ways. It seems that these basic parts could be manufactured cheaply in scale. Theses components could even be provided in differing scales (proportional scales of course) both for modeling purposes but also for handling varying scale problems.
Construx come to mind as one of best examples (A neighbor friend had them and I used to play with them a lot as a kid). There were connector pieces (mostly identical except for variations for swiveling etc), extents (these were lightweight and strong through a "U" geometry), and pads (these two dimensionally filled the possible planes created between the connector pieces. Imagine the tools, vehicles, houses, buildings, etc. we could build with such components on a larger scale!
What got me thinking about this was that I was thinking about how cars might be make more dependable. One of the major challenges with cars is the complexity of all of the varying little custom parts and angles and such. I was thinking, "why can't their be one universal fastener type and have everything be some scaled version of that". Of course this universal fastener would not come loose on its own, but would be easy to remove when desired (perhaps a lock pin or something like the little lock bearings on some socket wrenches).
My co-worker Bryn made a comment to the effect of "scale? Who would want these besides people like... you?!" He may have a point, but surely there are a few oddballs like me out there.