The Bone Tree Project

A made a tree of bones for a school project. Years ago he broke his arm - the inspiration for this project. It was more work than expected but turned out well. Here's the final result (click for a big picture):

There were many steps. First step, find butchers that actually have large bones that haven't been cut up. A was lucky to have a few generous butchers supply bones from veal, beef, pork, lamb and venison. Plus A had some chicken bones:

Step 2: Remove all meat, fat, tendons, etc from bones. About 4 hours of boiling in pots with borax and lots of scraping (Mom and dad helped with the scraping):
Then on to assembly. Some problems here: glue didn't hold the bones together, and couldn't figure out a to create a wire structure. But some experiments with wood screws seemed to work OK on the big bones. Then reverse for the small bones - screws split the small bones but glue seemed to work for them.