Thank you. Tried both methods, they both work, although it took me a while to figure that I have to lock down the weights for a particular bone after I'm done making assignments to it, else Maya just automatically undoes all my work. I think I'm going with weights for the moment. It seems like the more "general" approach, and I need to learn all the details of how it works (or doesn't work) for future work.

Thanks for the help.