The Shark Refin…ished

The biggest problem I had with the original version was that the fins looked like they’d been nibbled off by some of those RUKI. I spent a few hours working on a way to put some nice, wide, finny-looking fins on the body, without either having them flop around, or restrict the biting motion, and my effort paid off. As you can see, the new fins match the coloring of the body, stick out quite a ways, and have a nice shark-fin shape to them.

The next problem I had was the large bulbous eyes. Sharks are supposed to be stream-lined, and those really didn’t fit the look, so I added a pair of TAHNOK eyes, with a couple of black 1×2 flat liftarms inside of them to fill out the head a bit.

As for the body and tail, I swapped the “L”-shaped liftarm for a straight 1×5 liftarm to straighten out the hook on the tail, and then I added a pair of 1×5 liftarms to the body on either side of the dorsal fin, to give the shark a little more bulk to its body. I did make an effort to bulk up the belly region, but it restricted the mouth from opening.

I would have liked to make the dorsal fin look better, but I realized that any method I used to make it more fin-shaped from the side would only result in making it less so from the front.

The final modification that I made was to stick a #3 plus-rod through the top of the head and put a pair of half-bushings on it. This allowed me to thread a blue elastic-band through the liftarm that forms the dorsal fin and then loop it around the two half-bushings to cause the mouth to snap shut on its own.

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