The objective of this work is to present a comprehensive review of the Meccano technique for tetrahedral mesh generation, tracing its origins and development, and discussing its main advantages and limitations with respect to other meshing strategies. The Meccano method is a mesh generation strategy originally developed in the late 2000s by Rafael Montenegro and collaborators. It is based on generating a volumetric mesh of a complex object as a deformation of a coarse polyhedral approximation of the domain, known as the meccano. The method requires only a surface triangulation of the object to be meshed, which makes it especially suitable for complex geometries. The process begins with the construction of a parametrization between the boundary of the meccano and the surface triangulation of the target solid. To achieve this, the surface is partitioned into a set of patches, each of which is assigned to a face of the meccano, thus defining an admissible one-to-one mapping between both boundaries. Once the boundary correspondence is established, the meccano is progressively refined so that the image of its surface mesh under the defined parametrization approximates the target geometry within a user-prescribed tolerance. After reaching the desired geometric accuracy, the boundary nodes are projected onto the true surface of the object, while the interior nodes are relocated through a volumetric mapping. Since node relocation may deteriorate element quality, mesh untangling, smoothing, and local refinement techniques are applied to ensure mesh validity and quality. For genus-zero solids, the entire procedure is fully automatic, whereas for higher-genus objects the construction of an appropriate initial meccano requires additional user intervention.