I just finished playing an inventor Sim, I really wish I had taken a picture of this, for some reason it never occurred to me to take a picture.
I would send my Sim to the junkyard to salvage so he had many nice things to blow up on his property. Almost every single time he was about to blow something up, ta da, a gnome would show up on a salvaged table next to the item that was getting destroyed. Thankfully it was never a big explosion so the remaining pieces were untouched and the gnome safe & sound. But my gnome had a death wish. A lot of death wishes.