LOS ANGELES — Imagine getting paid to make bacon jewelry, build a nacho cheese hot tub or cover lawn chairs in sod.

Five people in Los Angeles actually do. Carpenters, engineers, mad scientists — they create the zonk prizes for “Let’s Make a Deal.”

Reward and risk go hand in hand on the game show. Choose the right curtain, box or envelope, and you could drive home in a new car. Choose the wrong one, and find yourself staring at a ram truck — as in one shaped like a horned sheep’s head.

Host Wayne Brady makes contestants’ dreams come true. The zonk makers call themselves Dreamcrushers.

Not that they’re mean. These are cheerful guys, infectiously pleased with their labor. Their goal is to keep contestants laughing as they lose, even make them want to keep the zonks. (They can’t, though they might get $100 in exchange.)

Head zonk-maker Timothy Feimster, 35, grinned early one recent morning as he prepared for two shows being taped back to back.

Just behind the set, pristine prize cars were being dusted and polished. Feimster, known as Jersey, was checking on his monster van.

That it had started out as a 1965 Volkswagen van was not immediately apparent.

The crew had transformed the van using wire mesh and spray-foam insulation. They’d carved its now craggy, lumpy body and painted it metallic gray. Bug eyes went on the front and duct pipe arms on the sides, each topped with big, red Mickey Mouse-like hands.

At the push of a button, a long, red tongue would slide out past pointy teeth as smoke spewed from the monster’s giant open mouth.

“I always tell everybody I feel like Tom Hanks in ‘Big,’ because I get to play with toys all the time,” said Feimster, a bearded, boyish bear of a man who is on the job every day but Sunday.

Like the other zonk makers, John Bevan is a set dresser by trade and has worked on episodic TV shows and movies.

Although that kind of work tends to pay more, Bevan said, he happily signs up for the game show’s seven-month season, commuting about 600 miles round-trip each week from Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

At Sunset Bronson Studios in Hollywood, zonk-making is a team sport.

Bevan is good at electrical work. Max Webb knows cars and welding. Ricky Bartlett jumps in on everything and makes the zonks look their best onstage. Brian Chrismon is the animation whiz.

Their toolbox includes a 3-D printer and a CNC machine for cutting custom-made parts. The crew takes on everything, from construction to staging.

How do crew members come up with their crazy creations?

For starters, there’s a prize each season for the best staff-suggested zonk. (This year: $200 and a new TV). Viewers also submit ideas online, which Feimster reads every day. Some (cactus swimwear) hold promise. Others (sausage dollhouse) not so much.

“Let’s Make a Deal” contestants come costumed. They jump up and down. But when the show first aired in 1963, women in dresses and men in suits sat politely in their seats.

In the pilot, host Monty Hall quizzed a couple on their knowledge of “each other’s worlds.” For cash, he asked the husband to identify flowers and the wife a hammer and level.

It may have been a different era, but booby prizes were present from Day One. “They knew they had to put them in the show, because there would be no jeopardy otherwise,” supervising producer Chris Ahearn said of his predecessors.

Go-to zonks in Hall’s day were typically alive, or old: a dusty Model T, four little lambs, a ratty raccoon coat. In 2009, when the latest incarnation of the show began filming, junk was Feimster’s go-to too.

What makes a good zonk now? Something that riffs off a real prize. A pair of designer pumps carved out of butter. A bedroom set just like the real thing, only with half a bed, half a mattress, half a lamp, half a dresser.

What makes a great zonk? Something that Brady, announcer Jonathan Mangum and model Tiffany Coyne can play with onstage.

Anything ridable. Anything drivable. Bonus for a big surprise. Hence the pirate-ship car complete with a cannon that shoots Zonk T-shirts into the audience.

Feimster works with a zonk budget of $100,000 a season, and that has to cover 175 episodes.

So he scours Craigslist for golf carts and other used things he might need. Sometimes he tells the sellers his plans, sometimes not. “I got a baby grand piano from a woman who had taught 50 years on it. I was like, ‘Oh, it’s for a show,’” he said. “And then I cut it in half.”

As for the half he didn’t use, nothing gets thrown away. On three stages and in two warehouses, abandoned parts and old zonks wait their turn.