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Hello all! Just thought I'd share some WIP photos and a little backstory on one of my new SIB projects. This time around, I've decided to model the ill-fated S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, a Great Lakes ore carrier that was lost with all 29 hands on November 10th, 1975, during a storm on Lake Superior, and subsequently made famous by the folk-singer Gordon Lightfoot and the song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald". To this day, the exact cause of the sinking of "The Mighty Fitz" as she was known, is unknown, and the wreck of the Fitzgerald lies in two pieces 15 miles west from Deadman's Cove, Ontario, Canada. As for the model, it's still in early stages, but I'm hoping to get it completed and bottled in the coming weeks. Cheers, Brendan O. Brendan O.

Hello once again everyone! Along with the Edmund Fitzgerald, I'm also working on making a mini-SIB mode of the RMS Titanic, partly to win an informal wager (i.e. just for bragging rights) about just how small a bottle I can put a ship or a boat in, but also in the spirit of the old-fashioned saleman's sample. Back in the old days, before TV or even radio, nevermind the internet, it was common for traveling salesmen to carry around little models, often highly detailed, of the products they made to show to their customers to give them an idea of what exactly was being sold and how it worked. In fact, that's how one of the big names in plastic model kits, Airfix, got its start, by making a salesman's sample of the then-new "little grey Fergie" Ferguson tractor. I've seen examples of virtually every kind of product imaginable made as a sample, from furniture and clothing items such as shoes, appliances such as sewing machines and typewriters small enough to fit in your hand but still able to sew or type, farm machinery, windmills, kit-built full sized buildings, even cutaway livestock (made by a meat packing firm to show both the internal organs and the various cuts of meat), the list goes on, so I got to thinking, why not a sample ship in a bottle? After all, I tend to get asked what I do as a profession on a fairly regular basis (what I'd like to know is why it's so important to know what a person does for a living, after all, we're more than just our jobs), so I got to thinking what if I had a tiny SIB I could whip out of my pocket whenever the subject comes up and say, "I make these, just in bigger bottles"? I think it'd certainly make an impression! As for the subject for my revival of the salesman's sample, I decided to go with a ship I've done several times before, and thus know almost like the back of my hand, the RMS Titanic, which I'll be putting into a minuscule liqueur bottle I literally found lying on the side of the road. It's certainly tiny, I doubt you could a pair of grapes into it, and as such I've had to a do a bit of selective compression in regards to the detail level of the model, though I will be giving it an honest effort to try and put all the usual detail parts on such as smoke, flags, ancors+chains, and the lifeboats and their davits, etc, and be as faithful to the prototype as my other Titanic models have been. At present, it's about 50% complete , and I'm hoping to get the rest of it done as I work on both this model and the model of the Fitz. Not the smallest SIB ever built, but it's the tiniest I've ever made, and I think it'll make a good sample. Regards, Brendan O. (P.S. The pencil is included as a size reference)

Ahoy all! Just thought I'd share a few Work-In-Progress shots my latest project, a SIB model of the Britannic, the "forgotten sister" of the famed RMS Titanic, and the third and final member of the Olympic-class, which were built by Harland and Wolff of Northern Ireland at the behest of the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company AKA the White Star Line, in response to Cunard's twin giants Lusitania and Mauretania. The Britannic was originally intended to be the ultimate expression of what the Olympic-class ships were supposed to be, thoroughly re-engineered to benefit from the Titanic tragedy, having been modified to have a double hull along the length of the boiler and engine room compartments, and her watertight bulkheads having been significanly raised (one or two going up to the very top of the ship), meaning she could stay afloat with the first six compartments fully flooded, compared to Titanic's design of only four (five ended up being breached by the iceberg. These improvements, along with plenty of lifeboats and new giant gantry davits to lower them, being able to swing over to the opposite side of the ship if necessary, prompted shipbuilding magazines of the time to label her "The most perfect specimen of man's creative power as is possible to conceive". Alas, Britannic was fated never to carry a paying passenger, for she was requisitioned by the Royal Navy and completed as a hospital ship for service ferrying wounded and sick military personnel back to Britain during the Gallipoli Campaign of WW1. Britannic was subsequently lost on November 21st, 1916, the now-accepted cause being that she struck a mine laid by the German U-73, with the loss of 30 lives, having sunk in 55 minutes. As for the model, as I've stated elsewhere on the forums, I like to make SIB's that are unusual, and that I favor steam and motor ships as these are relatively under-represented as compared to SIB's of sailing vessels. As I've already made Titanic and her tender Nomadic, it seemed only natural to start "rounding out the family" by making a SIB of the Britannic too. These photos represent the current state of the model, being approximately 70% complete, with the hull and superstructure mostly finished. All that's left to do is apply the final detail parts such as hatches, cargo cranes, the anchors and anchor chains, the crow's nest, rudder, flags, etc., then it'll be time to rig the ship's masts and Marconi aerials with thread, then to do the painting and apply the smoke for the funnels before the final dismantling and re-assembly inside the bottle. I'll be posting up further photos and commentary as the work progresses, please feel free to comment or constructively critique as you see fit. Cheers, Brendan O.