Just curious, what is your preferred method for deconstruction? Are you meticulous in taking things apart, keeping like colors or shapes together as you go, or are you a bit more reckless? I take a reckless, yet efficient approach (at least to me). I start by meticulously, yet rapidly, removing all the spheres from a construct leaving a mass of bars and panels. I then take the mass of bars and panels and shake out all the panels until I'm left with one mass of bars and a pile of panels on the floor (or table). I then convert the mass of bars into long strings of multicolored bars, letting the magnetism do most of the work (kinda like pulling strands from a ball of yarn). From there, it is relatively easy to separate the colors of the bars into their respective colors, and then finally, I separate the panels into their shapes and colors and then stack them onto 6-bar length rods capped on the ends by 2 spheres. Does anyone have a better method?
I decided to go thru my collection of bars and mark the north end of each bar with a sharpie (permanent marker) to use as a visual cue on polarity in addition to the magnetic cue. It is a long and tedious process, and I'm about 1/3 done with my 2100+ collection of bars. So my 2nd question is: Am I crazy?