Glen McGuire

Welcome to the best site on the interweb, Jay!!

I took care of the suggestions from @Keith Black and @Knocklouder by adding some light frost to the ship's wheel and a glop of snow to the ship's boats. I like the way it looks, so thanks to Keith and Bob for the good ideas! I want everything to appear as frozen, but in the process of thawing out. Of course here in central Texas, I don't have a lot of real life experience seeing things thaw out from snow and ice, so I'm doing the best I can!! The clay mini-icebergs and floes finally dried. Again, I made way more than I knew I needed so I could pick and choose which ones fit together better. I did some filing and shaping to give them sharper edges trying to make them look more like ice than blobs of clay. Here's the final arrangement. I still need to hit each piece with some gloss varnish to give them a bit of a shiny, wet look. Next, I made a footprint of the ship. The process will be to place the footprint inside the bottle exactly where the ship will go, glue each piece of ice in place around the footprint, remove the footprint, and replace with the ship. The good news is that if anything on the ship breaks during the insertion process I will claim I was just following @Ian_Grant's suggestion above and adding to the abandoned appearance!

I like the way your sails look, Bob. Especially the way you tied them to the yards with double loops.

Whoa! That is amazing work, Ian, especially considering you were in high school!

I certainly did, Ian. That was one of my original thoughts. But when I got her put together, I really liked how those topmast square sails looked on top of the typical schooner sails, so I didn't want to diminish their appearance further than the shredding.

Unfortunately, I do not have Captain Marvin Ship Inspector to guide me thru my builds like Knocklouder does for his. I've only got Dimples the Surly Cow for help. And she says no-go on the ship's wheel icicles. However, she said that adding a touch of "Gesso frost" to the wheel would be ok. And she did give a nod to adding some snow inside the ship's boats. So I'll work on that. Now if I could only keep her from getting those horns tangled up in the rigging.

Is this the gumming that you are talking about and want to remove it (see pic below)? If so, the only thing I can think of (rather than reprinting as you describe) would be to try and "floss" the converging gaps between the fingers. Maybe try some super thin fly tying thread and carefully work it back and forth into the gap.

OK, Keith. I managed to fit the wheel onto the Jenny's deck. A touch large for scale, but I still think it's a good addition.

The air-dry clay takes a few days to fully harden so I decided to take the opportunity to try something new. I'd been wondering for quite some time if I could fashion a reasonable looking ship's wheel at this scale, but I'd never taken the time to see if I could actually pull it off. I figured now was the perfect time time give it a whirl. I played around with some different ideas and here's where I finally landed. I took a .08" diameter dowel and used a 78 drill to punch 6 equally spaced holes around the edge. Then I snipped off 6 pieces of .015" music wire and inserted them into the holes to make the spokes. Next, I trimmed the spokes to equal lengths and sanded the outer end of the dowel almost flush with the spokes. Next, I took some .01" wire, wrapped it around a bamboo skewer (.14" in diameter), and glued it onto the spokes. Finally, I cut the wheel off the dowel, sanded the backside almost flush, painted, and affixed to a post. And voila! It's certainly not a thing of beauty, but I think it's at least recognizable as a ship's wheel. I don't know yet if I can fit it onto the Jenny's deck. If not, I'll save it for a future build.

OK. Back to the build! I was not quite satisfied with how the Jenny looked so I decided to cold-weather her a little more. I added some hanging icicles to the rigging on the martingale along with lumping some additional snow on the gaffs, booms, and yards (small bits of modeling clay). The I finished it off with some light frosting on the ratlines (thinly brushed on Gesso). I think I'm good with how cold she looks now. Right before I started this build log, I had added the water (epoxy resin) to the bottle. The next step is to create the icebergs that entomb the ill-fated Jenny. The plan is to make the icebergs and arrange everything outside the bottle. I took some wax paper and drew a footprint of the water, then started molding the bergs out of modeling clay. It's got to be a large collection of small bergs since they have to fit inside the narrow bottle opening. I made more than I need so I can fit them around the ship like puzzle pieces. After the clay dries, I'll sharpen some edges and try to get them to look more like icebergs rather than lumps of white clay.

Sounds like it was worth the drive to Llano! I hope you stopped at Cooper's BBQ on the way out or back. On second thought however, I imagine the line at Cooper's was stretched way down the road! No doubt, Keith. I've seen partial solar eclipses before but this was my first total and as Gary said, there's a huge difference. Even though it was only for 5-10 seconds at a time here in my driveway, seeing the corona and the Baily's beads were spectacular.

@Knocklouder That's a cool story about the Canadian penguins. Now if you could only teach them to hunt rats!!

Fantastic sewing skills on display!

A small diversion from the build... I am fortunate enough to live right in the path of totality for yesterday's solar eclipse. Unfortunately, we had a thick layer of clouds streaming in from the gulf of Mexico during the middle of the day which obscured much of the view. However, there were fleeting moments with small breaks in the clouds. At my house I was scheduled for almost 3 full minutes of totality. In reality, I got several 5 to 10 second windows. The really spectacular part was when the sun began to reappear. It looked like small flames dancing on the edge of the darkened sphere while it caught fire. Seconds later the thick clouds came roaring back and shut down the view again. Here's a couple of pics taken with my phone camera. They do not do justice to what it actually looked like, but are still pretty cool.

I did not recognize it when I read your post, but now that you mention the title, I remember it from speech tournaments in junior high! Yes, a difficult read and recitation.

That is captivating. Thanks for sharing, Ian.

Roel, here's one more pic I found that shows the hinge pretty close up. Hope all of this helps.

Hey Roel! My mast hinges are a "hidden hinge" method I learned from one of @John Fox III's build logs (his are a work of art while just mine manage to get the job done!). The masts are 2 piece. I cut a narrow slot in the top end of the bottom half of the mast. For the top half of the mast, I carve out a narrow tab the fits snugly in the slot. I angle the base of the slot and the end of the tab to form a "stop" to keep the top half from folding the wrong way. Then I'll put the 2 halves together and use a 78 drill bit to put a hole thru both. Finally, I insert a piece of .015" music wire for the actual hinge and put a dot of CA glue on each end of the wire to secure it. I believe Mr. Fox uses wood for the hinge rather than wire. Here's a couple of pics from my Treasure Fleet build that should give you a better look. If memory serves, Mr. Fox had a sequence of detailed pictures of his hidden hinge construction in his build log but I cannot remember which log I saw it in.

OK. Back to the build… Like I mentioned in the first post, we are joining this program in progress. The ship construction was pretty much the same method I’ve been using – laminated basswood hull, thinned bamboo toothpicks for the masts, yards, and bowsprit, gutterman thread for the rigging, and shirt cloth for the sails. My plan was to build the ship as if it were new and then distress it from there. I took very few pics along the way since I was not planning on doing a log. But here’s what I’ve got. The first pic shows the ship almost complete in its pristine fashion. The second pic shows my first efforts at shredding all the sails except the stay sails. The third pic adds the stay sails and some smudging. I scraped graphite from a carpenter’s pencil into dust, stuck the tip of my finger into it, then dabbed it onto the sails. In the last pic I added the anchor and then tried to add melting ice in random places about the ship. The melting ice is small bits of modeling clay. Again, I'm tying to give it the look of an abandoned ship that's thawing out from it's icy, Antarctic tomb after 17 years.

Funny you should say that because this whole penguin thing got started with a polar bear comment by @Keith Black during my Aurora build! Exactly! As you can see from the last picture in the post below, if a mast breaks, or a sail rips, or lines break it will just add to the effect of an abandoned, weather-bashed ship!

Thanks for the heads-up on that, Phil. Sounds like a great reference. I've got his book on the Sailing History of the American Navy but I need to check out the one you mention as well.

I have no idea (nor does anyone else apparently) if the real Jenny was one of those or not, but I'm with you, Chris. When I came across that painting, I thought it was such a unique and beautiful ship with 3 masts, the schooner rigging, and the top sails on the fore mast. As soon as I saw it, I knew that's the one I had to try and build. However, I promise you that when you see my Jenny, it will NOT be anywhere near as beautiful as those in the pictures above. I'll try to get some pics of it posted tomorrow.

All of the sudden I'm feeling like W. B. Travis at the Alamo!!

Well, I was gonna skip doing a build log for this project because I intended to just make a quick SIB for my niece as a gift. But I got a little nudge from @Keith Black and @Knocklouder to start one, so we’re going to jump into this thing in progress. I’m almost done building the ship but much work remains inside and outside the bottle. The Backstory Some time ago, my brother received a $200 bottle of scotch as a gift and just recently gave me the bottle. Of course, the bottle was empty just like the Kraken rum bottle I got from a friend last year 😠. I need to choose better friends and brothers I guess. My brother has a daughter named Jenny, so I thought it would be cool to find a ship named Jenny and make a SIB as a gift. I started looking around to see if there were any interesting ships named Jenny. The only one I could find was one called the "Ghost Ship Jenny". Of course that intrigued me right away. Ghost Ship Jenny The Jenny was an early 1800’s 3-masted English schooner. In 1822, she left her home port on the Isle of Wight in southern England for a journey to Callao, Peru on the western coast of South America. Late in the year, unbeknownst to anyone, she got trapped in ice on the return trip while navigating the Drake Passage between the southern tip of Chile and Antarctica. Seventeen years later (1839), a whaling boat named Hope was navigating the Drake passage and spotted a large schooner drifting among broken ice floes. The Hope’s captain and several crew members rowed over to the ship and boarded her. They discovered it was the long-lost Jenny. The entire crew was found dead with their bodies well preserved by the cold. Many of the forgotten crew were still lying in their hammocks. The Jenny’s captain was frozen at his desk hunched over his last log entry, “May 4, 1823. No food for 71 days. I am the only one left alive.” Real story or Fake News? Adding to the intrigue is the fact that there's a lot of uncertainty about whether the story is true or a just a chilling legend. Jenny’s tragic plight was written about in several periodicals during the 1840’s, but none of the publications cited specific sources that referenced either the Jenny or the Hope. There is also speculation that Jenny’s story was, perhaps, a retelling of another event that happened to a ship named Octavius that was found near Greenland 50 years earlier, both sharing remarkably similar circumstances, albeit in a different century and opposite end of the globe. Ghost Ship Jenny the SIB So I thought that was compelling enough for the subject of a SIB. There aren't any pictures of the Jenny to build from (since no one is certain she was even real) so I've got a lot of artistic license. There also don't appear to be a lot of 3-masted schooners from that time, but I did find a painting of what looks like an 1800s era 3-masted schooner as well as an early 1900s Dutch one called the Oosterschelde, both of which I am using as a guide for my Jenny. My idea is to show the Jenny inside the bottle trapped by small icebergs. I want her to looked like she's been stranded there for many years, so I’m shredding and smudging her sails to give them a tattered look as well as trying to figure out other ways to make her look ravaged by the cold and weather. Here’s a couple of pics I’m using as a rough idea for a ship trapped in ice and tattered sails. The penguins are feeling right at home and clamoring loudly to horn their way into this build. I've held them off for now, but not sure if I can for much longer...

Wonderful work, Papa! Well done. What is that fixture she is mounted on right now?