Glen McGuire

LOL! That remains to be seen. The trashcan may get a nice Kraken meal when all is said and done on this! He is trying to earn back his input privileges. I think the longship is a reasonable suggestion, so he has moved up from banned to probation..

Glad to have you along for the ride! I hate drinking alone!!

The Ship - Oseberg I described the concept to my son and he immediately suggested doing a Viking longship inside the bottle. I loved the idea, especially since I had not tried one before. So I started digging around and found a longship whose look and story grabbed my attention – the Oseberg. The Oseberg is a Norwegian Viking longship that was discovered in 1904 during the excavation of a burial mound in Tonsberg, Norway. It is considered a Karve, which is a smaller longship used for both warfare and trade. Based on dating of the wood and artifacts, the Oseberg was believed to have been built in 820 AD and buried 14 years later as a funeral ship containing the skeletons of two women of royalty or high social status. As for the ship itself, the Oseberg was almost entirely made of oak, about 70 ft in length, 17 ft wide at midpoint, with a 30ft high mast. There are 15 oar openings for 30 potential rowers. Interesting pictures of the archeological site can be found here: https://thevikingherald.com/article/famous-viking-ships-the-story-of-the-oseberg-ship/92. My version of the Oseberg will be fashioned after a model of the ship from the Maritime Museum, in Stockholm, Sweden. There are also several good build logs for the Oseberg on MSW that I will look to for help on some of the details. The Kraken There are several versions of the Kraken legend. I’m going to try and fashion mine after the classic Jules Verne description from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: It was a squid of colossal dimensions, fully eight meters long. It was traveling backward with tremendous speed in the same direction as the Nautilus. It gazed with enormous, staring eyes that were tinted sea green. Its eight arms (or more accurately, feet) were rooted in its head, which has earned these animals the name cephalopod; its arms stretched a distance twice the length of its body and were writhing like the serpentine hair of the Furies. You could plainly see its 250 suckers, arranged over the inner sides of its tentacles and shaped like semispheric capsules. Sometimes these suckers fastened onto the lounge window by creating vacuums against it. The monster’s mouth—a beak made of horn and shaped like that of a parrot—opened and closed vertically. Its tongue, also of horn substance and armed with several rows of sharp teeth, would flicker out from between these genuine shears. What a freak of nature! A bird’s beak on a mollusk! Its body was spindle-shaped and swollen in the middle, a fleshy mass that must have weighed 20,000 to 25,000 kilograms. Its unstable color would change with tremendous speed as the animal grew irritated, passing successively from bluish gray to reddish brown. My plan is to build the longship and insert it in bottle, then somehow make a kraken holding the bottle. If I haven’t given up and gone into hiding somewhere along the way, I’ll finish by adding roiling seas around the kraken on the display base. Here we go!

Early last year, a good friend gave me a bottle of Kraken rum thinking I could use it for a future SIB project. I’d consider him a great friend had there still been rum in the bottle, but since it was empty he’s only a good friend. It’s the thought that counts though, right? So after finishing up the Adventure Galley SIB, I decided it was time to do something with the Kraken bottle. But what exactly? I wasn’t real familiar with what the Kraken was, so I started googling. Most pictures I found showed a huge octopus-looking thing wrapping its tentacles around a sailing ship. Hmmmm. For some weird reason, it made me think of the 80’s and something that you’d find in just about every honky-tonk bar and high-class living room in Texas back then - an armadillo on it’s back holding up a bottle of Lone Star beer like it was fixing to drink it. Then the dim light bulb in my head flickered on. Why not try to make a SIB where the Kraken is acting like the armadillo, holding the SIB above the water like it’s trying to drink the ship out of the bottle? The bad news was sculpting a Kraken creature would take skills way beyond my abilities. The good news was that the friend who gave me the Kraken bottle also happens to be an incredibly talented artist who does amazing carvings and sculptings. So I threw out the idea of a collaborative effort on this project. Unfortunately, the timing was not good for my friend so he declined. Which means I’m gonna try to do this whole project myself. Lord have mercy!

Those ratlines are not spaced very evenly. They look a little wider on the left and narrower on the right. Can you fix that, Dave?

Nice work on the detailed painting, Dave. Totally agree. I'm between projects but still hop on MSW all the time to see what progress everyone is making. God bless and happy new year to you too!

Happy new year to you too, Ian. So fascinating to watch this thing take shape.

Thank you, Keith! Same to you and your loved ones.

Welcome, Tim! Looking forward to seeing your work.

Thank you, Mike!!

Thank you for the kind words and the pirate toast, Grant! But this... OMG! I just did another forehead slap. 😃🙄

Thank you, Mark!

Thank you, Knocklouder! And dang, I wish I'd thought of using the toasting pirates emoji!! Thank you, Keith! I appreciate your insight and good sense of humor along the way. You always keep me in good spirits! Thank you, Dave. I really appreciate you following this build! Thank you, Ian! I thought about having a little pirate with a peg leg holding the lid open. But I figured if I can't even carve a simple penguin, no way could I do a pirate!

The adventure with the Adventure Galley comes to an end! I mounted the bottle inside the chest, surrounded it with pirate bling, and called it a wrap. For comparison, the first pic below is the original concept for this project roughed out in powerpoint. Despite the countless bumbles along the way, I'm pretty happy with how things turned out. Time to yo-ho-ho with a bottle of rum!

On my models, the really close-up pics expose all the flaws and make things look worse. Somehow, yours is the opposite. The closer the picture, the more realistic it looks! That last pic is just amazing!

Let me add my congratulations to the group on such a fine build. It's been a real pleasure watching your work, John.

Back to the display to finish this whole thing up. First up was adding a layer of sand around the chest to make it look like it had been recently unearthed. Going into this project, I had no idea what I was going to do for the sand. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine bought some Mod Podge for a small project. She barely used any of the bottle and asked me if I might need it for my SIB work. I had never even heard of the stuff, so I told her that I’d look around the MSW website to see if any other modelers used it. Sure enough, it looks like a fairly popular product. Then I found one build log where the light bulb went on and bells started dinging. @turangi, For his Emma C Berry – Model Shipways build, used Mod Podge to make a gravel base for the display. He had really cool concept where he showed the ship in drydock having repairs made to the hull (see 1st pic below from his build log). His gravel base looked like what I had in mind for the sand around my treasure chest. So I decided to follow Turangi’s lead and see if the Mod Podge would work for my display. I mixed up a glop of sand and Podge, dabbed it around the treasure chest, worked it to the edges, and then mashed it around a bit to create an uneven surface. Then I sprinkled a layer of dry sand over the whole thing to give it a realistic texture. I let the whole thing dry overnight and then dusted off the loose sand. It came out pretty much like I had originally envisioned. So a big THANK YOU to Turangi for an excellent build log and showing me a great use for Mod Podge!

Welcome to MSW, BG! Lots of amazing folks out here. I learn something from them almost daily!

Welcome, Ray! Glad to have you aboard!

LOL!!! You are absolutely correct, Mike. The bowsprit on this ship had a much higher angle than my previous builds. I noticed that right away and had the same concern as you. I did some early test fitting to see what impact the sharp angle might have on the insertion process and was prepared to lower it if necessary. Fortunately, I was able to keep the same angle as I had originally planned. But to your point, had the bottle's neck been any longer I would have been forced to take some artistic license. You are correct again. And all the concerns you mention are the reason I've done it that way for the last four builds (along with haunting memories of my Amati Hannah disaster when my ship sank in the soft acrylic paint water). As I know you are aware, it's difficult trying to place the hull in it's exact position with tweezers or whatever you are using for grasping. I've found it so much easier (and less stressful) to just drop the ship anywhere inside the bottle, add epoxy to the dry resin, and then move the ship onto the epoxy. As for pouring the resin once the ship is inside the bottle, I know there are some very skilled people out there that do it that way. For me, there's just too many things that can go wrong. And I believe most of those things would be almost impossible to recover from. Thanks for your all thoughtful comments, Mike. I always appreciate your insight.

OMG! I'm dying laughing!!

That is an excellent point, Keith. One that I had not considered. I went back to the video and did a screenshot (see below). It looks like I had plenty of room for 1 boat on the starboard side but maybe not on the port. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise! Thank you, Pat! And thanks especially for adding extra pressure to the next project!!

Well, heck. I thought the drama was over. But noooooooo, the palm-to-forehead slaps keep piling up on this project! I got up this morning feeling smug about my work, took an admiring look at the ship resting snug and secure inside the bottle, and began snipping the pull threads below the bowsprit. And then I realized I had forgotten to attach the ship's boats before putting the whole thing in the bottle. Yet another dodo moment. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. Fortunately, it was not too difficult to put the little devils in place on top of the crutch. Then I added some texture and whitecaps to the water. With that, the work inside the bottle is officially complete! Now it's back to the display to finish things up. On the homestretch now!!

That is a great analogy, Keith! I could not believe the video was only 4 minutes long when I looked at it afterwards. It seriously felt like it took a half hour to get that dang thing inside the bottle! That is so cool, Dave!! Now I'm really glad I edited out all the swearing and cursing like Grant said! 😃

The real moment of truth was the next step – smashing down all the masts, yards, and sails and pushing the top half of the mast into the bottle. I made all 3 the mast hinges with slightly different angles so they would lie down next to each other rather than on top of each other. This proved crucial as there was zero room to spare. Part of the challenge was the crow’s nests taking up more space than simple mast tops. After quite a bit of starting/stopping/adjusting/nudging/and gentle persuasion, it finally passed thru the neck and into the bottle. And the best part was that I heard no pops nor did I feel any snaps! So I was pretty confident I had not broken anything. After a huge sigh of relief, I added epoxy to the top of the bottom half of the hull and laid the top half in place. I let that sit overnight and then raised the masts the next morning. Everything was intact and the top of the main mast cleared the inside top of the bottle by about 1mm!! Another huge sigh of relief. The 3-piece ship idea actually worked!!! If anyone would like to see the full insertion process for the top half of the ship, I made about a 4-minute video and posted it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO8o8WckMl4