Shark Head - Tumblr Posts

I assembled that shark head mask design last night! Here, have a whole bunch of progress shots of me making it! Putting it behind a break so it doesn’t take up 5 pages of your dashboard:

Got no shots of it being cut, oh well. Here are all the pieces stained and laid out. I used blue and turquoise stains, with sparkly stuff mixed in. The manufacturer calls the color/additive “pearl.” I haven’t had much chance to use it yet.

That really long Y-shaped piece at top is the part that goes all the way from the nose to the back of the neck, and it’s where your head goes through. I put in a bunch of grommets into it to make the lace-up closure work nicely.

The first big thing is to test-assemble the whole thing, in case I messed something up with the design. I don’t want to start riveting it all together only to find halfway through that I messed something up.

So! Time to soak all the pieces in water to soften them up, and get going!

Starting at the center in the back.

Adding the next piece on the side, with the gills over where your ears go.

The next piece, with the side of the mouth. The eye is starting to make sense. Next comes the detail I was most worried about: the turning point at the nose.

And it worked! The leather flexed and curved just right. I had not expected it to work out this well.

Here’s what the interior looks like at this point.

Starting up the next side, in the same order. Here we see the closure, now starting to hold itself in place. 

The second side. It’s really starting to hold its shape well now.

About to deal with the second side of the tricky nose joint.

Looks great! Now just need to do the front of the neck.

Yay! Time to try it on, because I couldn’t resist.

OK, so all the parts fit together, it looks good. Now I have to do the harder part of actually hammering all those rivets closed so they’re permanent. The tricky thing about this, is you can only hammer something down from above onto a flat surface. Basically, if you’re trying to assemble a sphere out of small pieces, you can easily re-position the pieces to do the riveting while the assembly is pretty small. But you run into problems as you get close to closing it up.

What that boils down to is, I need to re-evaluate the design and figure out an order that I’ll be able to assemble it in. To get it done, I’ll basically need to disassemble the whole thing and re-assemble it.

I start with the nose...

And everything’s messy and floppy. The rivets right up in the nose area have been pounded flat. The ones down by the neck I just left in place from the test assembly to try to keep things a bit tidier while I work.

Pound it in, hammer it out. Gonna speed up the telling a bit, because it’s basically just “once more with feeling.”

Here I’ve got both sides done, and am starting up the center.

And it’s assembled! Now it just needs to dry. How do you hold something like this in place so it doesn’t flop or squish while drying?

Carefully. It’s sitting on a roll of tape wrapped in a towel perched on the tip of a strip of wood cantilevered out from my shelves. It’s actually stable. Kinda jank, though.

Thanks for reading! Sorry for the somewhat non-professional workshop environment (being, my basement bedroom). But I figure it’s more important to make cool things at a high level of quality. I often try to maintain a professional image when presenting my stuff, but sometimes it’s good to see how the sausage gets made.

I haven’t gotten nice photos of it yet, I’ll try to do that tomorrow.