Is it all chocolate? And are you going to eat it? These are the most common questions that Newcastle chocolatier Dean Gibson gets about "Iron Shark".
The answers to those questions are "yes and no".
"The whole thing is chocolate," Dean said.
"We've motored through 250 kilos of Italian couverture. That is very high quality chocolate."
But no, he's not going to eat it. The 2.5-metre long sculpture - weighing close to 200 kilograms - will be unveiled to the public at Crowne Plaza Hunter Valley on Saturday.
"It's a beast," Dean said.
The aim is to set a new world record for "the most moving pieces of a chocolate sculpture and the largest kinetic chocolate sculpture of an animal ever created".
"We plan to move the parts at 2pm to set the record. We have a main cog at the back and we move it by hand," Dean said.
"It's 30 moving parts, including the jaw and rudders. We have telescopes."
Iron Shark is the vision of Dean, who is also a renowned pastry chef, industrial designer Jon Pryer and videographer/photographer Shane Williams.
The sculpture imagines a 19th-century submarine in the style of the science fiction of Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells.
This chocolate time machine takes us back to a world where steam was the new punk and the Nautilus roamed the imagination. Nautilus, for those who don't know, was the fictional submarine belonging to Captain Nemo in Jules Verne's novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island.
The sculpture was created in a room at Hamilton North's The Creator Incubator.
"Newcastle is where we've traditionally done these activities, but we want to take this on tour across the world," Dean said.
"We have some interest in Italy and Shanghai. We're trying to push the line between patisserie, industrial design and art."
It takes great skill to make a sculpture from liquid chocolate.
"Normally when I do chocolate sculptures, people think they belong in a trade fair. This shark is a piece of art. It's a novelty that it's made out of chocolate," he said.
After it is unveiled in the Hunter, the sculpture will be placed in Continental Patisserie's library in Sydney.
The library has more than 1000 patisserie books. The chocolate shark will be placed on a table in the centre of the room.
Dean said a library, art gallery or museum is the right place for the sculpture to enable "engagement with young people".
Youngsters are fascinated by Iron Shark.
"I've seen jaws dropping from kids to teenagers, who still have imagination."
The plan is to build the same sculpture again for a world tour.
"We can build it live in a two-week period. We can set up a full pastry kitchen in an art gallery and build Iron Shark from liquid chocolate to a moving sculpture," he said.
"There's nobody else in the world doing what we're doing."
While the sculpture won't be eaten, a limited run of 150 Iron Shark chocolate bars have been made to mark the unveiling.
"The funds we generate will support what we're doing, which is expensive," Dean said.
They have also made T-shirts and bon-bons, as part of a bid to commercialise the concept.
"With Iron Shark, we have a good brand."
The sculpture will be on display at Crowne Plaza Hunter Valley from 10am and 3pm on Saturday.
