Glen McGuire

Love your work, Keith. Everything is so clean and crisp. Glad to see you back in the shop! Can't wait to see the remaining stages of this beauty come together.

Looks fantastic, Grant. Interesting that the yardmaster's office is clapboard while everything else has standard siding - almost like it was an add-on well after the original structure was built.

Just stumbled onto this log. Very interesting build, Phil. And very nice work.

Thanks, Keith. At least I can get the planking done in a few days vs a few weeks for a real size model!

Thanks for all the help on the Kraken figure. I will circle back to that later. Now it's time to build the longship. It's unique shape is going to present some fun challenges. With oars, the width of the longship is going to be too wide to fit inside the 3/4" bottle opening so it's going to necessitate a split hull like the Adventure Galley. The high rise of the stem post and the stern post are too tall to fit so I will build them separately and attach inside the bottle. Since there is only a main sail, there's no need for a hinge on the mast. So I will also build it separately and attach inside the bottle. As far as the actual construction of the longship, I'm trying a couple of things I haven't tried before. First, I'm doing sort of a bulkhead method for the hull, except the bulkheads are all glued together for a solid hull. The longship is so flat compared to the others I've done, I think this method is easier to get the proper shape. Second, I'm trying to do a small bit of actual planking for the first time on a SIB project. After studying so many Viking ships, the clinker-built hulls stood out to me as one of the iconic looks. So I want to do my best to give my Oseberg something that resembles clinker planking. Once again, I'm poaching pieces from my Artesia Latina Constellation kit which has been gathering dust in my closet since I stumbled down this SIB path. The planking strips from the AL kit are razor-thin (.4mm according to my caliper), so I'm using them to try for a clinker look. Here's progress so far. Not sure yet how well this is going to turn out.

Thank you, Phil! I will look into that.

Thanks for the pics and links, Mike. Your description above is exactly the picture I have in my mind for the Kraken's role in this project. @Keith Black also sent me some links from Etsy which I had never thought about as a source for creative images before (duh). So thanks to both of you for opening my eyes to that site! According to my map, Caribbean rum is a loooooooong ways from Melbourne! There's got to be an Australian equivalent???

Always glad to have you on board, Mike! Can you send a picture or 2 of that? I'm a long ways from working on my Kraken but I don't really have a solid idea of what I'm going to do with it yet. So looking at your fantasy miniature may help me move from idea to reality. Yes, gotta have the oars since I think they are part of the iconic longship look! Which means I will have to do another split hull to fit it inside the 3/4" bottle opening. Also, how was the Kraken rum? Since my gifted bottle was EMPTY 😠😠😠, I don't have a clue!

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!