Bernard Kelly

Hi Gregg,  My first real build was the schooner bluenose, and I found a great set of directions by John Fox III.  I posted the bottling of it in the Build Logs.

Welcome to the forum Gregg!
Jesse

Hi Gregg and welcome. I think a cutter or single masted ship is a good place to start. Maybe search the internet,there are plans around. 
A good book to have for a beginner is “Sailing in Glass” and it includes a ship in a bottle plan for a cutter with all the measurements. The book also has other plans for several different types of vessels . I think it’s probably available on eBay. 
Anyway,good luck with ‘another hobby’.

Hi all, my name is Gregg , I am  a US Navy vet and have been interested in model ships in bottles ever since I got a book at Disney World back in the '70s, as the title says I am all over the place in my hobbies, I fly RC Helicopters, do model trains (N and O scale), build plastic models, but have always wanted to try this aspect of the hobby . I find for me that I need to take a break from one hobby when I hit a brick wall so to speak, so I am reading some books on the subject and will be going through the build logs on here. I just have one question, all of the books I have read in the past showed multi masted ships, I think I would like to start with a sloop or cutter rigged ship, where can I find drawings of models to build from. Thanks

Great work Onni, as usuall.
Bernard

Great work Onni, as usuall.
Bernard

Beautiful and very instructive build sequence, it always amazes me to see the ship as a perfect puzzle ready to be ensembled inside the bottle. To see  the ship sailing in its caapsule in front the snowed background is superb! Many thanks for sharing

I like how you hung it, kind of like the ones hanging in the church. Nice touch!
Jesse

Anyway have completed her now and she’s finished. Bit of a problem to get the bowsprit in place and also had to do a little repair on the rudder but otherwise went fairly smoothly and I am satisfied with the result.

Forgot to mention that before I started to put her in the bottle I did a balance test (because the ship will be hanging in the bottle.) Turned out she was too heavy at the bow so had to add some white metal to the underside of the aft castle which seemed to do the trick.👍🏻

Time to start putting her in the bottle.
The stand seen with the ship parts does not go in the bottle,it was only used as a construction aid.
 

Added the sails and some rigging,and tried to copy the flags/pendants on the original church model.  Stern lantern is made out of clear perplex. 
Everything is going to be a tight fit in the bottle!

The only plastic I used on this ship were the painted shields that adorn the outside of the fore and aft castles.
Checking how she looks with masts and sails.

Some friends of mine got a Siren 17 sailboat.  Not sure if this is a ship, but I put it in a bottle!

In progress...

One word Igor    EXCELLENT
Bernard

Results of 2021

My new project is in progress...

J.L.Runeberg,Porvoo,Finland.

HMS Victoria 1893. One of the few vertical standing wrecks in the world.

Fantastic model Alex.
Bernard

Hi Bobohamer!
Yes, I use the fly tying threads too during some last years. 

But I'm skimping on the ropes out of them with an electric rope machine. I usually use two or three strand ropes of 0.05 to 0.4 mm diameter for rigging

Absolutely beautiful work.  I wish I lived closer I'd take your advanced class in a heart beat.  
Regarding the oil on the sails there is one technique I've found and used which I find works well.  In the old video of George Fulfits ship in bottle building he used saranwrap to cover the sea while putting the ship in the bottle.  He also put some between the sails to keep the lines from snagging on the yards.  The only trouble with it is you wouldn't be able to get the ship secured to the sea until the masts were erected.  This is my preferred method any way so it works for me.  Using your wire and duct tape idea would also work with the saranwrap method.  Since the plastic is so thin it's easy to remove and protects the sails well.  

Finally the square sails could be added.  The material for the sails is much like what I have been using for years, a light weight paper colored with a warm gray magic marker.  Instead of using the point of a pin to scribe the seams or “clothes” of the sails I returned to an older idea and used a hard pencil.  Seams made with the pin tend to crack and split, and at this scale that could be quite a problem.  In spite of using a #9 pencil, the seams, only on the weather side, look a little too heavy to me. 

 
The final details are the boats and anchors, and I almost always put these off until the last.  Good miniature boats can be nicely made of paper but I’ve had no success with that technique at this scale.  There are carved out of pine and have paper thwarts.  Like the catwalk railing, these details may be more a challenge at this scale than they are really worth.  But not having them no would look worse, I think, so the attempt is always made. 
 

 
 
The bottle that renewed my interest in this project is a hand blown bottle by Michael Magyar from Cape Cod.  It is obviously intended to recall the classic pinch bottle, but happily is slightly longer and better accommodates a long ship like this bark.  My friend and fellow ship bottler Gerry Ross knows Michael and sent one of these bottles as thanks for getting John Guley to complete a prototype of a kit Gerry was trying to develop  John and I decided to give it to Charlie Ryan, another ship in bottler,  but John got in touch with Michael about ordering more.  After some back and forth we ordered 10 and split the order between us.  For the first of my five I bottled the 5 mast two topsail schooner Carl Vinnen. 
 

 
The glass clarity is wonderful but the inside shape creates a couple of problems.  The narrow corners inside are a little difficult to fill with putty and then get a smooth sea surface.  It takes going back over a number of times.  The corner on top, above the ship, is so narrow I was concerned whether the upper yards would have been braced around far enough for them to fit in this limited space.  The indent on the side of bottle underneath the ship protrudes so far into the bottle the putty base above it is very shallow.  But with the deep corners, the bottle takes a surprising amount of putty.  But there was an unexpected bonus.  Two air bubbles on the port side wound up acting as miniature magnifiers
 

 
The bottling took about a week between getting her in and feeling all was well enough finished.  Most of the difficulty was not having a secure enough bond with the putty sea, so that as I increased the tension on the stays, the model tended to head back towards the neck.  I got over this by fashioning a section of coat hanger wire bent to hold the hull in place and taped to the outside of the bottle neck with duct tape.  It is the first time I ever tried this, and I wonder if I’d recommend it.  But in this case, it worked.
 

 
The putty was put in the bottle months before.  Because of the effects of oil staining sails, I have greatly increased the lead time between setting the putty in and finally bottling the ship.  In spite of this lead time, the slight contact with the putty surface when bottling this ship immediately doused lower starboard sails with oil.  This may eventually become lighter, but the effected area will always be more translucent than the rest of the sails.  It may also spread, though I have rarely seen this with square rigged sails.
 
I first encountered this problem years ago when the late George Pinter from Halifax, Mass, recommended I use plumber’s putty instead of the glazing putty I had been using.  It took color well and was easy to shape into the bottle.  Unfortunately, the heavy oil content of the plumber’s putty began to stain the sails like this.  It also is supposed to never harden completely, and when the putty sea in a bottle I shipped to a gentleman in Texas became detached en route, that was it for me, and I returned to glazing putty.  Sadly, this oil staining has returned in the past couple of years, and I need to solve this.
 

 
Otherwise, this particular model was especially satisfying.  We all have early dreams and visions that inspired us to take on this kind of work.  For many of us, these are now many years old.  This model does not succeed in many ways, and has a number of details that could have been, and should have been better.  But it also succeeds enough in fulfilling early inspirations of mine to be encouraging, and give me hope there may well be similarly rewarding models in the future.
 
 
 
 
 

Very nice!     Complicated build for a bottle.    Here is my much  larger Archibald Russell at 25 feet to 1 inch (1:300).   One valuable tip that will work for a SIB regards the painted ports and the black stripe underneath.      The white band was cut from a sheet of good quality paper and the black stripe ruled on with black ink.   The painted ports were small squares of black carbon paper cut out and stuck on with the black uppermost.   The band, complete with painted ports and black stripe was then stuck on the hull.    It makes a very neat job and is OK for all scales.
Bob