Articulating a porcupine skeleton part 2

In this post I will talk about articulating the paw and attaching the scapula to the leg.


Once again, I soak the bones.

I start by drilling a hole in the humerus and scapula where they meet. Make sure that the holes are in the right angle!

I attach the scapula and leg, and let the glue dry.

I then work on the harder things:

drilling in the metacarpals and the phalanges.

I decided to not include the carpals (wrist bones) because I only have a few of them and it is very hard to find exactly where they go. 

Here's the name of the fingers, in this case in a  human hand:

In most animals, the distal phalanges are the 'claw bone'

I started with the metacarpals.

Drill a hole in both ends of the bone. it works better if you just drill through the bone (so it makes a 'tunnel'), but I could not because the drill bit was too big. (I used a 1.5 mm drill bit)

 Then, I cut the wire that will connect the metacarpals to the radius pretty long ..maybe 7 or 8 centimeters so  it'll be easier to tie the fingers together later on.  I glue that wire. (To help distinguish between the 2 forearm bones : the radius is thicker then the ulna whilst the ulna is longer. The ulna has a 'hook' at one end which connects with the humerus.)

I drill a hole on both ends of all the metacarpals, and proximal phalanges. (I only drill into one side of the intermediate phalanges)

I put wire like this

(the proximal phalanges and intermediate phalanges are already glued)

I then glued the intermediate phalanges to the distal phalanges (claw bones)...

and glue the metacarpals to the proximal phalanges.

I now have 4 fingers and a leg.

So, I must attach all the fingers to make a hand or paw.

here are the steps I took to attach the fingers:

this is what the completed paw looked like:

 and here's the finished leg. Love it!