putting it all together

so now that i took the time to separate all the vertebrae i have to put them back together again, only this time with joints. this was probably the most annoying thing i had to deal with. for the record circular brass nesting is excruciatingly difficult to work with when dealing with a heavy puppet, you either have too loose a fit and the whole thing turns on its axis or you layer it up with too much apoxy and the darn thing is so tight you might as well have glued the joint in place making the whole point of brass nesting null and void. unfortunately the place i went to only had the circular kind, not the square kind of brass nesting. next time i will take the extra effort to find the square nesting. so worth it!!!



after slamming my head into the table a thousand times from using that horrible round brass nesting it was time to see how the puppet looks assembled. unfortunately he has no feet so i had to stand him on his head. looks good to me!



i made a wood base, drilled a hole and shoved some more of that brass nesting and wire slathered with appoxy into place. after that was set i was able to attach the vertebrae.



and finally after all that was set, TA-DA! bone beast! about ten seconds later the whole thing toppled over and i spent the better part of the next day removing joints, re-gluing, sanding, etc etc until i decided to remove all the replaceable joints in favor of non-replaceable thicker wire joints. if i knew then what i knew now..... *grumbles something about the joys of puppet making*