Skeletons 2.0

I will start this post with a confession.  You all get to see the final product.  What you don't get to see are the mistakes.  On average, for each of my first-time builds, there are about three prototypes that failed that I do not post about.  I'm not saying that my first attempt at skeletons that I've posted several pictures of a while ago was a "failure," but I will say that one of the challenges with doing your own hand-crafted miniatures for gaming is that you will always, always, always find a better way later to make the figure, after you have made a whole bunch in the now-outdated way of making the figures. 

This is exactly what has happened with my skeletons.  The first posted skeletons were fine.  However, they were a bit on the brittle side.  In general, the biggest issue with my builds in terms of challenges for gaming is what type of material is contacting what type of material has a huge impact on how strong that joint is.  For example, wood to wood contact is always strong (I've got figures that I've tried to deconstruct where I cannot break the bond created by the think PVA glue and two pieces of wood!).  Wood to tile spacer contact can be fairly strong IF you have a lot of contact surface shared between the two pieces, or you have two or more places where there is contact.  I'm no engineer, but I would imagine these multiple sources of contact disperse any stress put on the two pieces in terms of breaking them apart, so two is better than one, three is better than two, etc.  Without question, the weakest contact in my figure builds is tile spacer to tile spacer.  The glue cannot permeate the tile spacer so it doesn't soak in.  At best what you have is what you would have it you used hot glue ... a smooth glue joint connecting the two smooth-sided tile spacers and it doesn't take a lot of pressure to break this smooth glue joint.  My skeletons suffered from this in a very bad way, because the tile spacer used to create the vertebrae was glued to a tile spacer pelvis.  That's directly in the middle of the figure and honestly the worst place to have that kind of a joining.

So what I wanted to do was create new skeleton figures that had as many wood to wood contacts as possible with no tile spacer to tile spacer contacts.  And when there had to be a tile spacer to wood contact, I wanted as much surface area as possible for both the wood and the tile spacer in contact with glue, or I wanted multiple contact points.  After many failed attempts, I hit on a few designs that I liked and met these design requirements.

Before I show them, I also wanted to say a little something about the "style" of the skeleton figures that I was going for.  All do respect to the brilliant Ray Harryhausen, who created the stop action skeletons from those classic Sinbad movies as well as the wonderful Clash of the Titans movie from 1981 (one of my favorites of all time!  Love that clockwork owl!).  But, rather than looking like and walking like a person without skin, I like my skeletons to look like they are about to fall apart.  They are clearly held together by some magical or supernatural force, which is not necessarily going to get them to behave as they did when they were covered with flesh when the creature was living.  So I tried to at least for some of these poses, to make them very dynamic and look like they were about to fall apart.

So here are four different versions/attempts at creating a new skeleton.  Except for the tile spacers, I've posted a picture below with the different wooden pieces I used to make these different versions (although I did leave out one piece but I talk about that later).

 In general, they are made up of a 3/8" bead for a head with a tile spacer end glued (square side first) into one of the holes in the bead.  This makes the neck vertebrae.  The head bead is the first round bead in the picture, at about the 2 inch mark on the ruler.  For most of them I filled in the other hole with glue.  For others I didn't.  I don't think it makes that much difference because I end up painting the nose holes in the skull where the hole would be anyway.  The nose holes are triangular in shape and the hole in the bead is obviously round, but from 2 to 3 feet away when playing with the figures, I'm not so sure your eye can really pick up that difference.  In the picture above you can see that little tiny round bead next to the larger one used for the head.  That bead is split in half, and then the half is cut starting in the center of the bead on the inside where the half hole is and cutting at a 45 degree angle away from the center of the bead.  This allows you to have a flat but pitched surface on which to glue the "jaw" (that's what the little bead becomes) onto the larger round bead "head" below the hole.  This creates the effect of a jaw.  It is a tremendous "under bite," but I think it creates the illusion of a skeleton skull where the jaw is so pronounced, at least to our eye.

The pelvis and the legs and feet are the same for all figures as well, just like the head.  The pelvis is made from a smaller oval bead (I think it is 9/16" long) that is split in half lengthwise.  In the photo I have a hole bead and then a bead that has been split in front of it.  It is hard to split them exactly in half, so if one is larger than the other, you want to use the one that is a little larger.  I'll explain why in a second.  The legs are a tile spacer with the rounded edges cut off to make an "X" shape.  The top of the X is the top of the legs and the bottom is the ankles.  This creates a sort of "knee knock" look where the skeletons knees and pushed inwards and touching, but again I think it adds to the chaos and the "looks like he is about to fall apart" look that I am going for.  The top of the X is glued into the split oval bead.  The reason you want to use the larger half of the bead (if there is one) is because you can insert the tile spacer well into the bead half and it will almost "grab" it, making that wood to tile spacer joint stronger.  The bottom of the X is glued to the base and feet made from tile spacers are glued to the base and up against the legs of the skeleton.  This is probably the weakest joint in all the figures, but by gluing the feet up against the bottom of the legs, even though this is a tile spacer to tile spacer joint, because both pieces are also being glued to the wooden base, it creates a pretty strong joint.

The shoulder and arms are the same for all as well, although I did vary the size of the tile spacer from skeleton to skeleton.  The shoulder is just a tile spacer with two sides cut away (creating a long straight piece with two rounded ends) and each arm is a tile spacer cut to shape (bent or straight arm, taper down towards the hands, cut thumb and fingers if you want, etc.).  These are then glued onto the tile spacer shoulder but not until it has been glued to the rib cage piece (discussed below).  This allows you to have tile spacer to tile spacer contact (shoulder to arm) but also tile spacer (arm) to wood (rib cage) contact.  Use more glue than you think you will need.  I literally created a "7" shape with the glue with the glue being applied to the entire underside of the should piece and the entire side of the rib cage piece, then I just placed the arm in the space.

The main difference in the figures are the bodies.  And this was where the original problem resided that I was trying to improve upon with the 2.0 version of the skeletons.  I wanted wood to wood contact for as many of these parts as I could do for strength.  This is where people are going to be grabbing the figure, the middle of it is where most of the force stresses against the figure when it is picked up and played with, this area of the figure had to be strong, strong, strong.  The look I was going for was a rib cage (which would be glued onto the shoulder piece described above), with some vertebrae (which would then be glued onto the pelvis).  I came up with 4 ways to do this, each has it's own strengths and weaknesses.

I'll start with the three on the left, what I thought was going to be my favorite design.

Before I start, the one on the far left sometimes tips over because he is leaning so far forward, but I don't care.  His pose is so dynamic that the tipping is totally worth it.  The rib cages on these guys is the flat plug in the picture, at the 4 inch to 4.5 inch part of the ruler.  The strength of this pieces is that both sides are flat, which makes the joint between the tile spacer shoulder piece and the rib cage as strong as it possibly can be.  Nearly the entire tile spacer is contacting the rib cage, so even though it is a tile spacer to wood contact, it is as strong as it is going to get.  The two vertebrae pieces are thin, flat beads I got in a batch of multi-shaped beads.  In the picture it is on the far right.  Two of these were glued together (wood to wood contact) and then they were glued to the rib cage (also wood to wood contact) and finally the entire piece was glued to the pelvis (also wood to wood contact).  I think they look pretty cool, my only complaint is that the rib cage is a little crisp and not rounded enough.  But that's a minor issue.

The last figure I did I will cover next because it was an attempt to make an improvement on the above figures with a different wooden rib cage piece that was more rounded.  You can't really see it in the picture of the figure, but here is that figure.

This figure's construction is identical to those three above except that the rib cage piece was not the flat plug, it was the axle cap that I am so fond of.  In the parts picture it is located at about the 3.5 inch mark on the ruler.  The nice thing about the axle cap is that it is flat on one side (the side that connects to the tile spacer shoulder piece) but rounded on the other side (which looks more like a rib cage).  You can see the difference in the picture below.  The one on the left has the flat plug rig cage, the one on the right has the axle cap rib cage.  I'm honestly not sure which one I like best, they each have their pros and cons.

Down to the last two designs.  These were made mainly for strength, and they are very strong, but they do not look quite as good in my opinion as the two above.

This first one is identical in construction to those above except for the body part of the figure.  I just used a mushroom cap, with the flat side connecting to the pelvis and the rounded side connecting to the shoulder piece.  It has a nice rib cage look, but the figure is a bit too "compact" (not sure how else to describe it) and it is harder to do the more dynamic poses with this construction method.  It also makes the pelvis look too big for the rest of the figure (it sort of looks like a fantasy dwarf skeleton I think because of this!).  But as far as strength goes, it is really strong.  Without separate vertebrae, that middle section of the figure is super strong.

The second one is a flat plug rig cage with a 1/2" bead (sorry forgot to put it in the parts picture) as the vertebrae.  It gives a little more height and doesn't look as "squat" as the one above.  It has one less vertebrae joint that the first pictures, so it is also pretty strong relatively speaking.  What I don't like about this one is the vertebrae are too large proportion wise for the rib cage.  Also, both of these figures suffer from having no physical representation of the vertebrae ... they would have to be represented just by painting them on.  But I did solve that problem by splitting some of the 1/2" beads and gluing them to the back of these figures as vertebrae, see below.

They look pretty cool, although they are out of proportion with the rest of the figure, and they do not match onto the vertebrae painted onto the front.  But still, they look pretty cool.

Now it's time for the action shots!

Our intrepid adventurers have stumbled into a burial chamber.  There must be something of value in that tomb, so the thief goes over to check it out.  When she touches the tomb the seemingly harmless collection of bones in the corners and sides of the room spring to life, animating and attacking the party!

Better shoot fast and switch to a melee weapon!

Behind you!!!

A dagger through the skull, if the dice are kind!

But what if the recently finished zombies also joined the fray!?  Cleric, behind you!  Turn them, man, turn them, or they will overwhelm you!!!