Once you have carved and sanded your pieces, give them a couple of coats of liquid latex and paint. It is amazing how good an untalented guy can make these look with just two different colors of spray paint. Do a couple of coats of flat white, then spay a mist of dirty brown at the joints. Do all this before you glue the joint pins in place. I used masonry line (Home Depot) for the tendons (another mistake. They gave out after about 2.5 hours of use. Use a stronger string). Tie one tendon to the loop at the claw and run it through the entrance hole of the middle bone. If you use a relatively stiff string, it will be easy to feed the string through the bone. Then feed the tendon through the inner-most tube of the final bone. Let plenty of extra string dangle. Tie a shorter piece of string to the loop at the middle bone and feed it through the outer-most tube of the last bone. The final product should look like this.
Attach the four spines to the back of the chair with 6" lag screws and some brackets. Be careful not to tighten too much or you will crush the spine.
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