Arvid's skeleton is made almost entirely out of brass. I chose brass since it is readily available and easy to work with. Most hardware stores and hobby stores have a good selection of brass tubes, rods and a few other shapes. I found that trying to solder brass with my soldering iron was just not going to work. I decided to try to use one of those Radio Shack mini torches using butane (not micronox) cylinders. This worked great. I also found that it makes things a lot easier to solder if you get some solder flux. I used the kind that is primarily used for pipes. I particularly like the paste kind of flux. At first, I was trying to hand hold the brass pieces with needle nose pliers while soldering, but this proved to be difficult. I decided to try to use one of the circuit board grabbers that Radio Shack sells. This worked great after I modified it by giving it some armature wire arms. You can get armature wire at most art, or sculpture stores. This device can also sink heat away from other parts if you are soldering very near another part that could become unsoldered. Now I could pretty easily position things where I wanted them. I also lucked out and found a little tiny vise that I can clamp to the edge of the table that I work on. This has come in very handy. All connections of the throttle cables are made using the parts that came with them. In places that I needed a threaded rod to bolt something on, I used a piece of brass rod that I tapped to a 4/40 thread pitch. This is a pretty common thread. I was able to find brass nuts for these and have soldered some of them in place.