This is the answer key. If you have not gone looking on the drawing yet, go and do that first, because finding them is the good part and reading them is not.
Open sheet 001 firstFour of them fix a limb onto the body. Four of them join two pieces of a limb to each other. That split is the whole answer to why a shoulder is not an elbow.
Screwed into the body.
There is only wood on one side, so a brass sleeve with a thread cut inside it gets pressed into the torso, and the arm turns on a screw that bites into that sleeve. Same idea as a wall plug. The screw is 20 mm long and at least five turns of its thread have to be inside the sleeve.
Pinned to each other.
Here two pieces of wood overlap, so the fastener goes all the way through the sandwich and shows a brass head on both sides. It is a barrel with a screw into the end of it. The barrel is 16 mm at the elbows and 18 mm at the knees, because legs are thicker than arms and the barrel has to reach across.
Now do the thing the drawing asked. Hold your own arm still and move only your shoulder, then only your elbow. Your shoulder swings almost anywhere and your elbow only folds one way. Ours are simpler than yours: all eight only fold one way, which is why he can sit and point but cannot shrug.
The drawing before this one asked for a 12 mm screw at the shoulders and hips. Add up the wood it has to cross first and there was nothing left over: it arrived at the brass sleeve with zero threads inside it. On paper it looked finished. Built, the arms would have come off in somebody’s hand.
A reviewer added up that stack and caught it. The screw went to 20 mm, and the sheet now carries the rule as a number rather than a hope: at least five threads engaged, checked on the first one built. This is what reviews are for, and it is the second time on this project that adding up a column of numbers has saved a pile of wood.
Rev C, the bulb-is-the-head revision. The Rev B screw was one of nineteen findings, two of them serious.
Every one of the eight has a springy washer in it, squashed slightly flat. That squash is what holds a pose: an arm has to stay up under its own weight, and still move when a grown-up hand moves it, with no tool. Too loose and he sags. Too tight and a child cannot pose him at all, or the wood crushes instead of the washer, and then he never grips again.
The ankles are the odd ones out. They are glued solid, because everything above them has to stand up, and the steel that keeps him from tipping lives in the feet. Nine joints would have been worse than eight. And there is no neck, because there is no head. The bulb is the head. That was the joke first and the wiring diagram second.
None of these exist in wood yet. The drawings are signed, the bulb is not chosen, and until it is, nobody can cut anything. That is on the board, stuck, where it belongs.
That is the end of this one
The word for what you just did is joints.
A joint is a place somebody decided a thing should bend, and every one of them costs money and can go wrong. Eight is not a number anybody picked because it looked nice. It is what was left after asking, one bend at a time, whether the figure could do without it.
Where to go now