Javelin

Hi Glenn, late to the party as ever, but do you recall any heating of the epoxy inside the bottle? Did it turn the bottle (at least at the bottom) warm? I'm trying to make a styrene ship in a bottle with epoxy (thanks for showing that process in this build log!), but I'm somewhat worried that the epoxy might melt the vessel or at least its legs while curing. And yes I'm going to try to pour the resin with the ship already inside and I'll make a first trial to see how I'll avoid messing up the ship in the process.

An old idea of mine was to put a Ship in a bottle, but I didn't (and still don't really) have any idea about old rigged sailing ships. So the idea was to put a modern vessel in a bottle, however due to their generally large lengths and slender shapes, they would become so narrow and low that they'd fit through the neck of a bottle without any manipulation. Recently however I found a vessel with acceptable measurements and a good challenge to put in a bottle. During research I never quite found a good guide around the net, but recently I discovered this board and Glenn McGuire's (as well as IgorSky and others') build logs. Their ideas gave me the right input to start my first own SIB. So here it comes. As the title says, the ship is the Sea Installer from the DEME company. She is a jack-up wind installation vessel used for installing foundations on the seabed, mounting transition pieces on top of installed foundations as well as complete windmills on top of those transition pieces. She is one of the rare versions of these vessels that jacks herself up on cylindrical legs (= like ship's masts) rather than lattice legs, which makes her suitable. Following Glenn's builds my idea was now to put a seafloor of acrylic gel mixed with sand on the bottom to have a solid floor. Then I'd install the vessel on her legs and pour transparent epoxy to simulate the water layer. I was warned by Glenn's posts about the extremely slow drying times inside bottles, so I tried several things to solve this issue. Since the acrylic-sand-water mix is basically hardening by evaporating the water, I put it on one of my central heating heaters and when droplets started forming on top, I inserted a styrene tube and blew with my airbrush compressor through that tube. This way you insert relatively dry air inside the end of the bottle and the moist air is pushed out through the neck, around the tube. Once the droplets were gone again, I stopped and let it sit untill droplets formed again. Here is a picture of that process. The small diameter tube is inside. Since I never tried anything like this before, I decided to invest in a full size prototype to trial the engineering behind my build. This gave me an idea of the size I'd be dealing with and the issues I might have. Here she is standing next to the original leg design (based on the hinging mechanism for sailing ships I picked up over here. The idea was to hide the hinge by pulling the hull over them. Although I had a tight fit around those hinges, I was affraid the leg would drop out while inserting it into the bottle or pushing the hull unevenly over the four legs with no room for correction inside the bottle. So I decided to make a reduction in diameter around the hinge with smaller holes in the hull. This way the leg would not be able to fall down during inserting, and the hull would not be pushed to deep on any of the legs, since it would rest on the larger diameter lower section.

Well there it goes, finally decided to join. Some might know me as Neptune at modelwarships.com, but Neptune was already taken over here. I'm in my late 30's, mainly building merchant ships from scratch in all sorts of ways, but generally styrene. I had noticed this site a long while back, but didn't notice any forum connected to it. Recently my interest was sparked by sailing warships and I discovered the awesome build logs over here. I've also toyed with the SIB idea for over 10 years without doing anything with it. I then noticed Glenn McGuire's builds over here and plowed several times through them. In short, I recently started my first SIB (of a modern offshore subject), but plan to create some more, eventually venyuring into rigged ships (I think, still need to learn a lot)