Bernard Kelly

I set my self a goal of finishing America in time for the Model Ships and Boats contest in Manitowoc, WI at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum.  That happens May 19-21, so I have a little less than a month to get everything buttoned up.
This weekend, I made major progress.  First, I built a little cradle for the bottle using some scrap wood.  That will keep the bottle stable while I work in it.

I made a plinth for the model from some spare oak strips I happened to have.  The pedestals are birch (I think) in brass tubes.  That was a tight fit through the neck of the bottle, but some gentle persuasion got it in there.

To do that "persuasion" I made a little tool with a swiveling head on it.  I could put a "tamper" through the neck of the bottle to put downward pressure on the plinth.  I used some Loctite adhesive to stick it to the bottom of the bottle.


Then I inserted the lower hull and glued it to the pedestalls.  If I had it to do over again, I would make the wooden portion of the pedestals a little longer.  They fit fine, but there wasn't much gluing area and getting them a little deeper into the hull would make it more stable.  I made them short because, outside the bottle, every time I tried to assemble everything with longer pedestals, I pushed up through the upper hull, dislodging some of the deck furniture.  Those things need to be short.

It took a little doing to get everything lined up, but it went fine.  I let it dry for a good long time before going to the next stage.

At this stage you can see the lower hull in the bottle, the upper hull on the erecting trestle.  I did test runs of collapsing the model several times to make sure everything worked.  One thing that definitely didn't work were the sheet lines.  I'd thought that I could suspend the sails by the sheet lines as they went into the bottle.  That just didn't work.  They were too short and got hung up every time.  I ended up removing them.  Best decision I made in this whole project.



In it goes.
There was plenty of manipulation needed once it was in the bottle.  The mainsail halyard got wrapped around the upper hull and I needed to pull back on the hull, raise the main mast, re-insert it, etc.  But, in the end, eveything worked out alright.  As you can see, there is little or no tension on any of the lines at this point.  The jib is still a little tangled in two other erecting lines, so I need to get that sorted out.  And then there needs to be some minor adjustments all around.  Then I need to secure all those lines with glue and cut them off.
I really enjoy building the model outside the hull.  Inserting it and working through these adjustments are, I find, really nerve wracking.  I'm happy when it's done.
Once this is all buttoned up, I'll start on the base for the bottle.  That'll be the easiest part of this whole project.  I have a nice piece of mahogany in my wood pile that'll be perfect for this.
 
 
 
Dan

It has been quite a long time since I posted anything, so I thought it time to give an update.
My experience with making the decals for the trailboards and the eagle on the stern was positve.



Then I finished off all the deck furniture.  This was all made from various pieces of brass cut and shaped as necessary.


Then I stepped the masts.

And made the various gaffs and booms.  More wood (toothpicks worked great) and brass for the boom jaws.

Those were painted white.
I made my sails by 1) drawing the seam lines on sketch paper, 2) copying those lines on the other side of the paper and then making two copies of that.  I know John Fox used his light table to copy lines from one side of the paper to another, but copier/printers are a lot more common today than in 1988, so I used mine!
Then I used the plans, proportional dividers and a machinist's protractor to get the angles and dimensions of the sails.  I made templates for them.


Then I laid them on the sketch paper with the seam lines and cut them out with the correct orientation.

A set of sails!

I've installed the sails and all the rigging now.  I found that I'd overstretched the foremast backstays, so I needed to remove and replace them, which is why the foremast pitches forward in this photo.

There's some tidying up that needs to be done on the rigging.  (Not a big job, but a time-consuming one.)  I finished cleaning up the bottle last night and will start getting the base and pedestals done so I can get the ship inserted.
That's a daunting task.  I hope, after all this work, the final product looks good!
 
 
Dan
 
 

Greetings Dan,
Good for you! That is the exact reason I always build full hull ship models.
Anchor's A Weigh!
John Fox III

I had a favourable change of schedule this week and was able to get back to the project much sooner than anticipated! I began, with much trepidation, the process of filling the bottle with the resin. I’ve never worked with resin before so I was a bit nervous about messing it up but it went off without a hitch. The funnel and tube assemble worked perfectly and the colour came out just right. 

 
Next I layered up 3 layers of mod podge inside using a paint brush to give some texture to the wake of the ship. I had trouble getting it to dry when after several hours it was still completely wet but this was solved by pointing a small desk fan into the mouth of the bottle to give it some airflow. 

Once the mod podge was dry and clear and I was happy with the texture reached in with some white paint to highlight the waves. Again, I don’t know why this image is upside down but it doesn’t matter much. 

 
once the paint had dried it was time to put the ship in at last! I bent up some wire coat hangers to use as my reaching tools and used this to apply some white glue to the middle of the wake. I also fashioned some long forceps/tweezers out of coat hanger with hockey tape wrapped around the ends to give it some grip. I used the makeshift forceps to carefully position the ship in the middle and press it down to dry. Next was to raise the sails but I needed to wait for the glue to fully dry and it was already past midnight so it was time to quit for the day. 

Bright and early the next morning I got to carefully pulling the sails up with a combination of hooking them with my coat hanger tools and gently pulling on the strings that came through the bowsprit. Once they were up I wrapped the loose strings around a screw to hold them steady and glued the strings into the bowsprit with a dab of glue on the end of a coat hanger. Once that glue was dry I was able to cut the loose ends with a regular craft knife, no need to make a special coat hanger knife thing. 

That was the hard part finished, last thing was to make a nice display stand. We had some old walnut laying around that hadn’t been used for anything else so I set to work cutting it up. I even bought a router specifically to make a nice decorative edge on the base of the stand. 


the finishing touch was to apply a coat of tung oil to darken the wood and give it a bit of a satin finish

And at long last, there it is complete! I thoroughly enjoyed this project and I hope you liked following along with this beginner’s first go of things. I’m incredibly happy with how it has turned out and I already have my sights set on the next project in which I will attempt to make a galleon. It won’t be for a little while though as this has consumed my thoughts entirely for the last couple months, especially being away and unable to work on it whenever I wanted to. Until the next one, enjoy these photos of the finished build!




Thanks and see ya next time!
 

Thanks for the nice comments on the build so far! I finally got the chance to come back and finish this model but it turns out I made a fatal error in its construction. The width of the hull was a tight fit into the bottle initially and when I put the pins into the sides to tie off the rat lines it increased the width just a fraction of a millimetre too much and it wouldn’t fit. I tried using a dremel to slightly widen the neck of the bottle but overheated it and gave it a small crack. The crack is hardly visible so I think I will still use the bottle but gave up on widening it and switched instead to building a near replica of the first ship but about 3 millimetres thinner and with a couple other small design changes that would help it fit in the bottle better. 

as you can see it’s mostly the same but the aft deck is much lower, the hinges have a lower rotation point, the bow sprit points slightly more up, I tied the sails to the spars with thread instead of glueing them directly, I added topsails and, changed the shapes of the triangular sails at the front to better match my reference image. I have tested it and this one fits in the bottle with ease. 
 
I also started some test batches of the resin that I intend to use for the water in the bottle trying to get the colour right and learn how to work with it as I have never used epoxy resin before. 

I think I’m going to try to match the colour in the bottom test in the image. It will appear a little darker when poured thicker in the bottle. 
I also made a funnel and tube assembly as well as a temporary wooden holder for the bottle to cleanly get the resin inside. 

Unfortunately due to the time it took to build the second ship I once again ran out of time to pour resin and place the ship in its final position so it will have to wait a couple more weeks until I’m in town again. I’m planning to either use mod podge or dab in some clear silicone to make waves once the resin has set. Has anyone else used that method or have any other tips and tricks for making waves? 

Hello all, here is my first ever attempt at a ship in a bottle, or a model ship in any form at all for that matter! It began when my father and I finished a bottle of Dos Maderas rum and were admiring the logo of a ship embossed on the bottle. This of course brought up the topic of ships in bottles and I decided quite spontaneously that I needed to build one right away. I was only going to be at my parents house for a couple days so I needed to work fast and all the work pictured below took place over just 2 days wherein I obsessed over this project all day stopping only to eat and sleep. I started by watching a couple instructional YouTube videos by ACutAbove Woodworking and then jumped right in to designing a ship; The Bottle Boat I. I know, very creative name.

With the design phase complete I roughly cut out the hull on the band saw.
Next was lots of sanding with various grits of sand paper to make it a little more pleasant to look at. I cut out the deck with a linoleum carving tool. Once it was faired I slid it into the bottle to make sure it fit.
I decided to add some little hatches made of chopped up popsicle sticks and a lifeboat that I carved from a piece of old pencil.
I worked for some time without taking any pictures but the result is here. Initially I tried making the masts from bamboo BBQ skewers but they were a nightmare to work with due to bamboo being very hard to drill through and also its tendency to splinter so I went to the hardware store and got 1/8” dowel for the masts and I think 1/16” or 3/32” dowel for the spars. I also folded up an anchor out of 22 gauge steel wire and painted and stained the hull and masts.

I decided to go for even more detail and made these railings by drilling and bending lots of wires into the deck.

Next I put the masts on the deck using the simple wire hinge method. I don’t know why the image is upside down or why my text is suddenly underlined. Oh well 🤷🏻‍♂️


Next I started work on the rigging lines. This was the part I was most concerned about doing with all the very small strings but it turned out to be not hard at all.
here I put in the main lines and tested the lowering/raising of the masts mechanism which seemed to work alright, there was a little interference with the rear mast and the lifeboat but with a little wiggling it would go up okay.

All that remained for the ship itself was to put on the sails! For this purpose I used some thin blank paper which I stained with coffee and this was the final result. (Please excuse upside down images)
I then had to drive back home before I got around to putting it in the bottle so it remains at my parents’ house for a few weeks until I can get back there to finish it.
 
I’d love to hear the thoughts and tips of some more experienced builders so let me know what you think! 
 
Blue skies and tail winds,
Ezra

Getting closer 
 

 

 
 
 

Hello all,
This is an unusual request but I came across this forum when looking for information on the 4 masted barque Archibald Russell.Going back many years, my father got me interested in the grain ships as he was. He told me he used to visit Falmouth on occasions to see the ships coming in for orders and he would get to know some of the captains through frequenting the Chain Locker on custom house quay and on one occasion he,my mother and my sister (I wasnt born then but my sister is still alive) were invited on the Lawhill by the captain at that time Arthur Soderlund.(I have photos of the invitation onboard).Anyway, my dad is long gone by 50years and about 5 years ago I successfully bid on a beautiful model of Archibald Russell at a local auction.Now the reason for this post is that I am trying to locate someone who had a personal connection with the ship as one day, hopefully not yet,  I will be gone,we have no children or  relatives alive and I just dread the thought of a sad future for the model.who knows where it might end up and my wife would not have idea of how to move it on,should she wish to.
It would make my day to find someone with a genuine love of these ships or at best maybe  a relative that sailed with the ship,so that I could pass it on and I would be content knowing the model would be in safe hands after me.
The model measures 22 inches (incl bowsprit) and is very detailed and accurate for its size.It is in a glass case.The name of the maker is on the brass plaque and have tried to trace him but to no ovail.For practical purposes,I guess the benefactor needs to be here  in UK.

That is a beautiful little model in all respects.   It never ceases to amaze me how little interest is shown in masterpieces like this.     It really is a superb build -     

This perticular model took part of 2021 and almost all of 2022 to finish. To be exact, a year and week. I probably could have finished her earlier, but in the end, the time I spent was well worth it. 
The model was made entirely from boxwood and brass, fully planked. The rigging is copper wire and the sails and flags are made from silkspan. The base is made from spalted tamarind and the sea is carved and painted boxwood. The model was built from original drawings made by the RN. I’ve chosen to depict the ship coasting into Tahiti in happier times. Most folks don’t realize that the weather was pretty poor through the time Bounty was in Tahiti, and I’ve chosen a moody sea. The paint scheme, I believe, is far more accurate than the blue and yellow we see in later paintings. The contemporary paintings we have of the ship were painted by artists who never actually saw the ship in person. The rest are done much later, and we do some some artistic flair with the colors. Bligh himself comes tantalizing close to the paint colors used, but he leaves us high and dry in the end. We know for a fact she was left in her civilian colors, her hull was coppered, and her fittings changed to bronze from iron. Also new masts were stepped, in the RN fashion, on which Bligh comments he’s not satisfied with how this was done. As for the colors, I think she would have been at least partially, if not fully painted black. The interior facing portions would have been red, as was the style of the day, but I just can’t see such a working vessel being painted anything fancier than black. Sadly we’ll never know. 
The model contains several thousand pieces and was built to a scale of 28’ to 1” or 1/336. The hull is carved boxwood with individual planks are held to the hull with approximately 1,500 tree nails which were inserted into predrilled holes. Paint, as always, is from ScaleColors. 
HMAV Bounty was a small collier purchased by the Royal Navy in 1787 for a botanical mission to Tahiti. Bounty, originally named Bethia, was built by Blaydes Yard, Kingston-upon-Hull, England and modified for her mission by the RN at Deptford Yard. 
The ship was sent to the South Pacific Ocean under the command of William Bligh to acquire breadfruit plants and transport them to the West Indies. That mission was never completed owing to a 1789 mutiny led by acting lieutenant Fletcher Christian. The mutineers later burned Bounty while she was moored at Pitcairn Island.
I have spent years reading about and studying Bounty, her crew, and her mission, and I’ve even been fortunate enough to acquire pieces of the real ship herself. If you’d like to see more of my work, I keep all of the model photos here: www.josephlavender.com
 




 
 
 

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Managed to finish it in time.

Hi, my Grandson wanted a “Battleship in a bottle “ for his tenth birthday next month,so I am building him ’Grober Kurfurst’ from the 1st ww era. Hope to finish it in time but still rigging,painting to do,plus to actually get it in the bottle. Hope that he’s going to like it when it’s finished!

Greetings All,
Here's the latest on my 1813 Lawrence/Niagara model at 1:200 scale. Added the fife and pin rails, and their nearly 100 belaying pins. Also started adding the cap rail netting, last photos show how they were made on a jib I constructed. The catheads have also been added to the model.
Anchor's  A Weigh!
John Fox III

Nice work;looking good.

It's been a long time since I posted here and it's not because I've given up on this model.  Quite the opposite, I've been here solving problems the whole time.  the biggest one I had was how to carve the bulwarks and leave the deck in good shape.
I started out with a #11 X-Acto blade, doing a lot of relief cuts and then removing the material.  That was slow going and didn't give me the results I wanted.  After a lot of time spent doing that, I turned to my Dremel with a milling bit.  (I probably need to get a new one of those because mine doesn't cut all that well anymore.)  That worked pretty well.  I mounted the Dremel in my drill press stand and worked the model underneath it.
 
I did the same thing on the bottom of the upper hull, carving out a space for the erecting lines, once they're installed.

Once that was done, I made the keel, sternpost and rudder.  I fitted everything, sanded it all down, applied a couple of coats of sanding sealer and then made a couple of extra-long pegs to mount the model in my vise.
 
I also like the looks of the timberheads on small models like this, so I decided to add them.

I've made a set of cap rails for the model too, edge bending them so I didn't have to use a bunch of pieces of wood.
First, I traced the bulwarks on a piece of tracing paper.

Then I made several copies and mounted them to a piece of scrap plywood.

I covered the drawings with waxed paper to prevent water from damaging the tracings.  Then I thoroughly wetted some basswood strips and bent them to the shape of the bulwarks.

After two or three iterations, when the clamps were removed, they retained the curves.  I'm going to do some painting next because, with the caprails in place, it'll be very difficult to paint the bulwarks.  I've test fitted them and they fit great!  So more to come when that's done.
 
 
Dan
 

Quick update.  I spent some time last night sanding.  I just put the template in place, marked where it touched the model with a pencil and then sanded away the pencil marks.
I think the next step is to work on the areas forward and aft of that mark.  I want to make sure I don’t overshoot the mark!
 
Dan

A little bit of progress last night.  I marked the locations of the frames from which I made the templates on the keel of the model.  Then I started carving.
You can see the marks and how the templates fit here.


I'm planning to work from the middle out.  Frame 9 is the widest part of the boat, so that's where I started.  And the most extreme curves of the hull are forward and aft of that frame.
 
 
Dan
 
 

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Greetings All,
I wrote this a number of years ago, and have shared it in the past, but thought it was appropriate to put it up again for those who had not previously seen it.
 
A Ship Modeler's Rhyme
 
'Tis the night before Christmas,
And out in the shop,
Not a creature is stirring
As I sit deep in thought.
 
I sit with hot cocoa,
Or coffee or rum,
While thinking about
All the work that's been done.
 
The frames are all glued
To the keel and faired,
While visions of me planking
Hang in mid-air.
 
I envision planking completed,
The hull looks so fine.
Then I get to check out
That new air brush of mine.
 
While the hull sits a drying,
I start on the spars.
I love this hand carving!
My hands bear the scars.
 
Then it's on to the details,
The one's no one sees.
Like framing 'neath decks,
And partners and knees.
 
Finally on to the rigging,
Those ratlines and shrouds,
Those forestays and backstays
For crying out loud!
 
There's no end to this rigging!
It just isn't fair!
I could have built modern,
And had time left to spare!
 
My late night "mind building"
Is at last all complete.
My cocoa is finished,
As I get to my feet.
 
I go to the door,
And turn out the lights,
I think Merry Modeling To All!
And to All a Good Night!
 
Anchor's A Weigh!
John Fox III

I finally got back to this model. I've gotten as far as rigging the mainmast, next onto the foremast and jibs. I couldn't decide if I should use paper or cloth for the sails so I used both. I first cut paper sails, I didn't like the way they looked so I pasted cloth on top of them. The paper provides rigidity and the cloth has a better look. I used coffee to stain the sails for a taupe effect. I hope to paste the picture of the sea battle into the bottle as a backdrop.

In progress.. 

Completed ‘Duguay -Trouin’ 1800.
Captured in 1805 and became ‘HMS Implacable. Scuttled 1949.