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Just got back from the Wisconsin Maritime Museum's 2022 Model Ships & Boats Contest and Show. As usually, it was a wonderful time with lots of great modelers, models and discussions. I want to publicly thank John Fox. We had a chance to talk and he gave me some great ideas -- and motivation -- for my next ship in a bottle. AND he gave me two Dimple Pinch bottles! That was really generous and I will definitely make use of those in the future. Thanks, John! Dan

Donald Campbell’s Bluebird K7, on Coniston water,January 1967.

Greetings Dan, You are more than welcome! Glad you found the presentation and our talk useful and inspirational! I was happy to share the pinch bottles with someone, since I knew I would not use them. Good luck with your next project, looking forward to seeing what it is and how it develops. Anchor's A Weigh! John Fox III

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Thanks, John! Really looking forward to your talk in Manitowoc this year! I think I've solved the problem: file size. When I reduced the size, everything went fine. Dan

I made a bit of a mess of it myself. The blurry photos make the water look better than it actually is. I used some fiberglass epoxy resin that I had left over from a canoe repair, and it was a sort of brown color to start with, so the color was not what I was looking for. I rigged up a funnel with a straw, and it was really slow-flowing. And then I mucked about a lot putting silicone on top of that, but it was hard to get a realistic wake and waves. Nothing like some really masterful water I've seen on some builds.

Hi Bobohamer! Yes, I use the fly tying threads too during some last years. But I'm skimping on the ropes out of them with an electric rope machine. I usually use two or three strand ropes of 0.05 to 0.4 mm diameter for rigging

Here we have HMS Tiger, The Most Splendid Cat, arguably the best looking warship the Royal Navy ever built. Launched in 1913, built by John Brown & Co in Scotland, she was assigned to the 1st Battlecruiser Squadron during the First World War. Tiger would go on to fight at the Battle of Dogger Bank in 1915 and the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Her official motto was “Quis Eripet Dentes” or “Who Shall Bear my Teeth”. The model is entirely built from boxwood and brass. The sea base is carved jellying wood and painted, and her rigging is mostly nitinol and copper wire. Of course the paint is by ScaleColors, nothing else will do. This model is a bit smaller than my usual scale of 125’ to 1” or 1/1500. Tiger here is around 1/1900 scale. I wanted to see if I could achieve the same fidelity at a magnitude smaller than my usual work. While I am quite pleased with this one, I think I do prefer 1/1500 as my working scale. If you’d like to see more of my work, I have a website with all of the pictures at www.josephlavender.com

So this is how I've made my fabric sail material in the distant past. A million years ago I bought a yard of this pretty sheer striped synthetic blend of fabric. Along with that I bought a yard of sizing material. It kind of looks like gauze and it's actually a kind of glue. I cut out a square piece of the fabric get it soaking wet and iron it till it is dry and wrinkle free. Then I cut a piece of sizing material that's smaller than half the size of the square piece of fabric. Then I fold the other half of the square piece of fabric over on top of the sizing. At this point I iron the two half's together. The sizing melts and bonds them with no bubbling or wrinkles. An important thing to keep in mind when doing this technique is to never let the sizing be outside the fabric. It will stick to the iron and the ironing board and you'll have a horrible mess.

Thanks Daniel: Actually those thread blocks are made of wire. I used the same wire to simulate the anchor chains too. I've had to start over on my boom, gaffs and club because my first suit of sails turned out to be a horrible mess. I tried using a thin coat of PVA on the fabric which looked like it was going to be fine at first but when I folded the sails to see how they would engage the bottles opening they came out again with creases I couldn't massage away. Bummer! So I'm going to go back to the way I use to make my cloth sails and that is to double up the fabric with a piece of sizing material in between then iron the two together. I'll take pictures of this process as I do it and post it in my build log. I haven't seen anyone else on the forum make sails like this. Hopefully they'll work out again for me. I'm going to start putting my sea in the bottle today ,too. I hate doing things twice and sometimes three times but that's how I eventually get there. I just keep chipping away at it. lol. Regards Bruce. By the way Page is a little cutie.😘

Then I needed only to fix the rigging with glue and to cut the ends of the threads, to install the bottle on the stand and to close the cork.