Hi, thanks for getting back to me.

Velusion: Yeah, it's a one piece skeleton. when I smooth bound the joints I selected the pelvis joint. I think it's just that the max influences was set to low. I am not sure if the option box lists all of the joints that bound to your skin or just the piece that you are working on. The slats can all be selected separately. I will try rebinding and have a look at some of the things you suggested. Cheers!

mtmckinley : thanks once again mate - you must be getting sick of seeing my poor excuse for silenus! I managed to paint the weights on the rest of the arm, it's just this one slat that doesn't show the pelvis joint when I select it and look in the paint weights options list. If you look at my second screen shot you can see the slat selected and in the option box there are only arm joints shown so I can't transfer the weight. Unless there is a way of adding joints to this list (is that possible?) I thought that that was what adding an influence did.

Thanks again for both of your help.