Tubjugger

I used up the contents of a clear square face 1 pint olive oil bottle, lovely bottle, but with Delallo embossed on all four shoulders. A corundum stone with water made short work of the embossed letters, leaving a frosted surface. I went at the frosting with various grits of diamond polishing compound on 1/2 inch felt cylindrical buffs chucked in a Dremel. I was careful not to contaminate the buffs with different grits, and had no trouble going from the frosted surface down to the same gloss as the bottle, took a while though. The diamond paste came from Tech Diamond Tools by way of Amazon, and cost around ten bucks per five gram syringe. A little goes a long way. After buffing with 200,000 grit there was no trace of the lettering.

I saw one as a kid on the mantel at a friend's house. The grownups wouldn't let me pick it up to study (I was seven) so I just looked the hell out of it and when I got a chance asked a nautical relative how it was done. He explained that they operated like puppets with the strings threaded through holes in the masts. Something he left out was that the spars had to pivot on the masts, so I wasted a couple of years letting the bottle neck dictate the length of my spars, simply gluing them in place with Duco cement. TJ

I've bought plans and scaled them with proportional dividers, but prefer to scale them from books using a printer. To keep things looking right, I cut out a scale sailor, measuring a fathom with out-stretched arms, and perch him at various locations as i go. TJ

I rough split and then use a draw plate to size the bamboo for the spar, then taper the spar either with a slip of fine abrasive paper or with a Jacobs chuck that fits my Dremel.I also generally favor eyes on the masts rather than drilling. TJ

Welcome Gordon, glad you joined us.

I very much enjoyed the movie. It's interesting that the various European powers were engaged in a protracted struggle which strained their economies, yet they all spent lavishly upon the gilded carvings which ornamented their ships. It must have been trying in the extreme to have been a ship's carpenter, since once the shot holes were plugged and the spars repaired, there was all that gilded gingerbread to be worked on. TJ

That's a fine crisp model with excellent choice of container, admirable piece of work Sapper!

The person behind the Philippine operation is Jochen Binikowski of Buddel-Bini, a bottler from Hamburg who went entrepreneurial.

check You Tube, Buddelschiff Produktion auf den Philippinen Tigaon Handicraft

Sigrid certainly has some of the hallmarks of a factory model, the bottle closure is suspect, even without the other models from a single manufacturer for comparison. The boot topping looks dipped, the red colored wale applied, and the deck possibly routed. Cloth sails make sense in a factory model since the cloth would be more forgiving of a quick rough voyage through the neck than would paper. I hope they were printed, for I hate to think that there is some poor soul out there who spends his days hand drawing the things. That's as far as I dare go based on the photographs available. The rigging is a mysterious delight, and I almost hope the method by which it was done remains a mystery. The triatic stay appears to serve no actual function, but seems an odd thing to employ as mere window dressing, perhaps it's a remnant from the rigging process. Reeving the jib stays back into the hull through a loop in the dolphin striker is delightfully Rube Goldbergian. The bits of line that appear to be rigged in isolation along the forward edges of the masts utterly perplex me. If the manufacturer indeed designed a model as simple as Sigrid to be mass produced with its rigging raised employing a single down-haul, I take my hat off to him. TJ

Bottlers actually don't have much standing in the world of art. At bottom we produce puzzle bottles which are largely written off as novelties. Importing the standard applied in static modeling doesn't improve our situation; it merely creates a pernicious hierarchy within our ranks. Ship bottling isn't the red-headed step-child of static modeling and doesn't need to ape the staticist metric in an effort to win approval, duck a beating or achieve validity. Bottling, whether of ships, crucifixes, spinning wheels or yarn swifts is folk art. It's unfortunate perhaps that there's just a touch of prestidigitation in what we do. Van Gogh didn't paint sunflowers through a keyhole with a long brush; a bottler would, which in some eyes makes our humble art just a bit disreputable. We also sometimes create overly elaborate frames for our work, stuff our bottles to the bursting point with light houses, sea-side villages, breaching whales and gnome-like figures whittling little ship models, but that's bottling. There's much more to it than a slavish adherence to historical accuracy. TJ

The art world finds room for Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Grandma Moses, the bottling community is ill served by adopting a single metric regarding the work of our members. Though it's hard to tell much about the mystery model from photographs, it appears to employ a novel rigging method quite different from the conventional umbrella method often employed in the "sailor" or "folk-art" model, and that's interesting. TJ

Excellent work David, i've been hoping you'd post some pictures, gotta see the things to believe them! TJ

Even with a #5 lens in an optivisor I have trouble seeing #8 flyline, ordered a #10 lens last week, am curious to see how it does. I'll be brushing off the rigging with my eyelashes most likely. I'm about sick of flyline anyway, and have dug out my cotton, which I'll be switching back to for my next model.