Attaching Bucky Shoulder Blades/Arms to the Ribcage

After attaching the remainder of your ribs in the same fashion as the first set, your corpse should look a lot like this image, minus the bucky arm attachment. We now have built a solid form that can handle bucky body parts, including skulls, arms and legs. For this prop, I didn't attach any legs, but on future projects I plan to use this same frame construction to attach a femur (bent at the knee) to create the appearance of a leg making its way out of the ground too.

Now, to prepare the shoulder blades and arms for attachment to the body, we need to dismantle the bucky hardware from the shoulder sockets. Once this hardware has been taken out, you can stain the bones (if you choose) with your favorite color of MinWax Gel Stain. Be sure to have plenty of ventilation or fans running when using the stain. I use a foam brush to paint the bones with the gel and after waiting several minutes, I wipe clean with a rag. I'll cover more on applying the gel stain coming up, in my steps on preparing the bucky skull for attachment.

Once you have taken your shoulder joint apart, you are ready to drill holes into the shoulder blade itself. It's through these holes that you will place more bar tie wire, in order to attach the shoulder/arm combo to the back portion of the ribcage. In this image, I've used my 1/8 of an inch drill bit to drill two holes, about a half inch apart from one another and 1/4 to 1/3 of the way down, from the top of the shoulder blade.

It's not imperative that these holes are in any specific position or distance from one another. They just need to be able to make contact with the upper rib. In this image, I drilled another hole (using the same size bit) a few inches away from the first two, close to the outside edge of each particular shoulder blade. In other words- to the far left edge of the left shoulder blade and to the far right edge of the right shoulder blade. This third hole will serve as our means for permanently positioning and connecting the arm to the shoulder blade and body.

After drilling your three holes, you are ready to position the shoulder blade against the back of the upper ribs. I hold the shoulder blade with one hand against the tubing and using my existing holes (the two that are nearest one another) as guides- I drill into the tubing. You can then insert another bar tie wire (with ends snipped off) to twist, locking the upper portion of the shoulder blade into position as seen in the image.

Prior to twisting your bar tie wire tight you may want to add a little Gorilla Glue at the contact site of the shoulder blade and tubing. It's not necessary, but provides added strength. Next you need to determine what position you want for the arm. It's important to hold it up for a "dry run" and get an idea of the rotation and angle in which you want it to intersect with the shoulder joint. This dry run will determine where the hole will be drilled, in the upper arm, for inserting your connecting bar tie wire. Play with it and see what looks best. Then you will have an idea of where to drill. Again you want to use your 1/8 of an inch bit to create the hole. After drilling, just run your bar tie wire through the arm.

You can now run your wire off the arm into the third hole that was drilled near the outer edge of the shoulder blade. Feed the slack through the hole and twist your ends together on the backside of the shoulder blade. You may want to leave the arm loosely attached for now until you determine where you prefer the position of the elbow joint and hands (we'll do this next). You'll notice that the arm in the picture is hanging loosely until it's time to permanently secure it. Next you can drill the two bottom holes on the shoulder blade (seen in the image) to attach it to the second set of ribs. Since the shoulder blade is already secured in the top connection, this set of holes is easy to drill into the bone and right on through the tubing. After drilling through, secure with another bar tie wire and Gorilla Glue.

At this point you may be wondering why we took the original Bucky hardware out of the shoulder socket to begin with? I find that the original hardware is far too bulky to papier mache over when adding skin to the corpse. The original hardware also doesn't provide the rigid stability to permanently hold the arm in place when compared to using bar tie wire and good 'ol Gorilla Glue (which we'll be using in the shoulder socket shortly).