Fiber-optic Shark Head Exhibit Piece

I built a custom light up shark head exhibit piece that illustrated the Ampullae of Lorenzini. The final pictures ended up being a little dark, as the area’s not really lit for photography.

The process started with a fiberglass blank of a shark. It came completely unfinished. I also had the taxidermy supply company not include the foam on the inside so I could still have access. The first step was to cut off the joints, and patch them. I then reinforced the inside with a lot more fiberglass as kids were going to be crawling all over it. The mouth comes empty as the taxidermists usually put the shark’s jaw and teeth inside. This worked alright for me as I could make a kid-friendly shark mouth.

The initial fiberglass work for the mouth.

Apoxy Sculpted teeth and lips. The teeth had to be both strong, realistic, and safe to touch.

I had a chance to use some of my welding skills from my college sculpture classes. I had to put together a really strong steel support structure on the inside so that kids wouldn’t be able to break the model. I reinforced everything with more Apoxy Sculpt.

 

Here’s the primed fiberglass and the initially built cabinet.

And here’s the fiber optics as I started installing them. It was extremely tedious to thread all of these through.