Yeah, patents could be a source of modding ideas but are specially great for a collector.
I have been "collecting" (printing) patents since they became available through the web directly from the patent office (for free). The USPTO site (
www.uspto.gov) only lets you do searches by patent number, date or classification on patents before the 1970's. But now it is much easier as Google (
www.google.com/patents) lets you search text regardless of how old they are. You can also do free international searches with Patent Lens (
www.patentlens.net).
Flying top:
http://ta0.com/museum/images/patents/flying-top_US-pat-2435445.pdf
