Update: Checked this morning (about 16 hours after assembly) and the ligaments holding the femur to the pelvis have partially torn under its own weight. There's a cut about an inch and a half long across the back of the joint. Three of four joints are unusable, despite apparently costing half the price of this entire skeleton.

First off, the joints don't work nearly as well as you're probably imagining. I'm sure they'll make great reference if I don't touch them but in terms of articulating anything, they're not quite there. Every single bone has a different softness and every single joint's ligaments, too. Adding to that the delicate pins and multitude of moving parts and I feel as if I'm going to break something when I bend anything.

From worst to best elastic joints:

Elbow: This joint is useless. The bones of the ulna and radius themselves are far softer than the joint's plastic and bend in a long curve along their length. Even the thicker humerus bends before the elbow does. According to this skeleton, your elbow creates a graceful arc as it bends and the elbow joint is its most solid point. I can sort of force the radius to pivot around the ulna but they really just twist around each other like a candy cane rather than actually pivoting.

Knee: The ligaments attaching running over and around the patella from the femur to the tibia don't actually attach to the tibia on my skeleton. An elastic string runs under them and into the bone but the whole mass just floats out in mid-air. I don't understand what the point of adding them was. Looking at the 3B Scientific website, the image for a replacement knee ligament is most definitely attached on both ends. It's $38 for new glue...

Shoulder: Without a mobile clavicle or scapula, you can only move the humerus so far. I find knowing the arrangement of ligaments on this joint a little more useful and the articulation is at least within the range of the humerus on its own. Technically nothing wrong with it, just not really as helpful without the rest of the shoulder's articulation.

Hip: (I originally had this listed as the best joint. It tore itself overnight).

With the arm and knee being the most useful joints to look at, a lot of this skeleton's usefulness is lost on me.

Instructions:

This skeleton has two sheets of instructions. The first is double sided and doesn't label any of the pieces you've received. There are a few pins with nuts on the end that you use to attach the joints and these come in two sizes. The sizes you need aren't listed, so I'll just point out that the big ones are for the shoulder and hip. The longer pin with a rubber bit on it is the pubic synthesis and I think it's actually intentionally bent (though there's nothing telling me which orientation is correct when putting it on...). As always, I don't know because the instructions aren't really there. The two smaller pins are used to attach the pelvis to the sacrum as has already been done with the opposite side.

The second sheet of paper lists the various joint ranges because apparently that's enough to satisfy their need to help me out on this end. As mentioned above, I have no idea what the joints feel like or how far I can really push them. It feels more like filling a balloon and hoping it's not going to pop. I can see that the elbow is meant to bend more than zero degrees, too. With all the joints feeling different, I can't compare one to another either. There's no explanation of things like retroversion and anteversion for amateurs like me, either. There's no instructions regarding maintenance, no explanation of the processes used to make the skeleton or the things I should avoid doing with it other than bending it too far. There's no pictures of it in motion, either. The cover actually has a running skeleton on it but it doesn't have the ligaments on it.

You can find the product manual online, luckily. It's just that same single sheet though so I don't know what the point is.

Oh, and two of the wheels have little breaks on them. I didn't notice until after I'd jammed them on because there's no description of them anywhere. The stand seems stable enough, the base is made of metal. A square metal rod runs down the spine and emerges inside the pelvis from the sacrum, then slides into the vertical post of the stand. The skull has a hole in the top and a long pin slides down into the top of that same spinal rod. It's a little hard getting the atlas vertebra to sit straight and balance the skull on it.

If you want the feet to not drag on the floor you need to lift the pelvic rod up a bit before tightening it in place. The store page's photo told me that.

The random plastic bag is a dust cover.

The sternum is the same transparent material as the ribs' cartilage but has been painted over white. The amazon store photos have also been adjusted for some reason to make the joint plastic look a bright red. It's actually the same fleshy peach that you see in all the other 3B Scientific skeletons.

The fingers and feet get a bit crammed in the package and need to be straightened back out again.

If this were priced maybe a hundred dollars above "Stan" (an identical skeleton without the joints, I think), it'd be an easy 5 just for trying something interesting. Double the price with just two out of four advertised joints functioning? I wouldn't recommend it. At its current price, it really ought to have a bottle of glue and an in-depth manual along with it. And less malleable bones...