Ship-in-a-bottle 1/2000 Sea Installer

[Neptune]

Well there it goes. It suddenly came to me.

As most people that know me, know this wasn't on any of my lists, but I decided to build a ship in a bottle. In the 20+ years that I'm hanging around here, I've never seen one posted, so someone should do it right?

It's been a long time plan of mine, put a modern ship in a bottle. However, most of my ships simply were too large, which would have meant a tiny scale to fit the length in a bottle. And at such a tiny scale, the draft and height of the vessel would make it quite easy to put it in a bottle, not impressive at all. I even had suitable (I thought) bottles collected over the years, but stashed them away on the attic around 2 years ago as I didn't believe I'd be doing that anytime soon.

However, I don't even recall how it happened, but I all of a sudden had the idea to put a modern jack-up off shore windmill installation vessel in a bottle. The legs (and crane) would make it impressive (and challenging) to do. So why this ship? Well the size is ok, but more importantly, she has solid legs. Most of the new and larger ships have lattice framework legs, which wouldn't really work for the hinging part (let alone create them at this scale without PE).

So I performed some research, stumbled across Glenn McGuire's SIB logs on Modelshipworld and decided to have a go at it. Of course this isn't a sailing ship, so I'd need some different techniques.

This topic may go dead at some point, or end up in complete failure, but I decided to share my voyage on this path with you all.
1/2000 is a tiny scale at any account, so detailing will definately be limited. It'll be based on the overall impression/concept rather than the actual details of the vessel.
I could have gone to 1/1800, which I've contemplated considering the height and length of the vessel and bottle, yet I (luckily) decided to stick with 1/2000.

I haven't done much actual work on it, but I did some testing. I built a small prototype/mock up of the vessel, testing some engineering solutions to get it in the bottle. I also did cut the bottom off a wine bottle for testing. The latter wasn't such a smart idea, since the actual bottle was a coffee liquor bottle, with a shorter neck and steeper curve. The wine bottle gave some head-aches, while a short trial in the actual bottle made life a lot easier.

Basic concept is to make a sea floor of acrylic-sand mixture which I've been using for the dredging vessels in the past.
Then mount the vessel in jacked-up condition on top (and glue it to the sand to avoid it shifting and/or floating later on)
Pour a transparent blue epoxy layer for the water, so you should be able to see the feet standing on the bottom.

Technical solutions for getting it in the bottle, are hinged legs, with the hull sliding over the hinges as a sleeve to straighten them out inside the bottle.
The hull will also be split in 2 parts longitudinally to fit through the bottleneck. So I'll need assemble the parts inside the bottle (hence the testing inside the wine bottle). Additionally I wanted to have the crane in a higher position, not parked on top of the bridge, so I'll be adding the crane (around the portside aft leg, when the hull is inside the bottle). And last but not least, the accomodation, with a helo platform that sticks out even more, will have to go in separately and be turned 90� inside the bottle to be mounted on the hull.
Some of the seams I will (try to) hide under deck equipment, others will probably remain as they are, pre-assembly out of the bottle will need to minimize the visibility of those seams.
For the split I've decided to split it with angled parts forward and aft, so it's self centering, additionally I'll be mounting 2 pins to make it fit.

Glenn warned in one of his logs that drying something inside a bottle is awfully slow, since you don't any air flow. For the time being I'm purging my bottle from time to time with air from my air brush compressor. This replaced the humid air inside the bottle with fresh drier air and least speeds up drying a bit. The condensed moisture which accumulates at the top of the bottle also disappears when I start this process, so it seems to work...

[Pieter]

Has it really been 20+ years? That may be a better explanation for my grey hairs than a certain Ark Royal kit. Nice project, looking forward to seeing more of it.
" In the 20+ years that I'm hanging around here, I've never seen one posted, so someone should do it right?"

[Neptune]

So, drying mud in a bottle is not a brilliant idea (but necessary nonetheless). If you leave it, it might take 1 year I guess. However, putting it on the heater and then purging it with compressed air, does speed up things a lot. The secret appeared to be a longer purging time, untill all droplets have gone from the top of the bottle. Then leave it again for a while, then purge again. Bottom layer is now nearly dry, I will add more when it's dry, since the complete bottom isn't covered yet.

During this time I've started on the actual model.
The original design of the legs that I had in mind was simply a hinged one. I would then drill a hole and add a small pin above the deck level, which would prevent the leg from falling down during bottling and it would also act as a mechanical stop when the ship was pulled down over the hinges inside the bottle.
The pin would have a very minimal clearance since it would be inside the leg casings standing on deck. You can see the leg casings dry fitted on deck for a dimensional check here. I will eventually use those casings on the final hull.

Old leg design with the prototype

I now made a new leg design by turning part of the leg to a smaller diameter and drilling the same diameter hole in the hull. This automatically prevents the legs from falling out and also creates a mechanical safety for dropping down inside the bottle, as the smaller hole would sit on the larger diameter part of the leg just below the hinge. When slid up, the smaller diameter will not be visible, since it would sit inside those leg casings on deck.

New leg design with reduced diameter near the hinge.

Furthermore the hull shape created some difficulty, as the bow has a rather sharp angle in it, much like a sponson. I decided to create a continuous bow and then add the top part of the bow like a sponson (but a tiny one at that).
I also changed the split of the hull from the original. It now contains the bow and stern section on one side. Slanted sides along with the centering pins create a good centering effect for mounting. Also on deck the slanted sides are not continued and the split is made straight. This creates a vertical edge to align the hull halves inside the bottle. The slant also allows for an easier bow and stern construction.
The vessel has a rather odd Voight-Schneider propulsion consisting of 3 propulsion units. The center one is mounted on the slanted part.

[Donald]

Interesting project. About 50 years ago I tried putting a 1/1200 scale (I think) Airfix waterline Bismark (remember those?) into an old-fashioned glass milkbottle (remember those?) with a blue hot wax sea-effect base. Complete disaster. Hope you have better luck.

[Guest]

Looking forward to progress on this! A very cool ship you�ve chosen!

[Neptune]

Some more progress, I'm sort of curious about this, which drives me to continue. Unfortunately a model like this may be perfect outside the bottle (which this one will not be ), but may completely fail when being bottled (glue dried before I can mount the pieces together, melting by the epoxy etc.

I therefore decided to add another tiny syrup bottle to my testing stuff. I also added a layer of acrylic sand to the bottom and will be mounted a piece of styrene inside (glued to the sand with acrylic gel), I'll then pour epoxy inside as a test to see if the sand doesn't create too many bubbles, or if the styrene rod would bend or whatever can go wrong with this mix of parts and liquids.

I've added more sand to the bottle, here a picture of the method for drying it. I put the bottle on the heater, then insert a small styrene rod and put the hose of the airbrush compressor to that hose. This way the dry air gets inserted in the back of the bottle and the moist air can escape through the neck around that styrene rod. I do this until all droplets are gone from the bottle surface. Then I repeat when new drops start forming.

The hull joint remains somewhat of a head-ache, certainly the bow gave some issues as you can see here. Eventually I resorted to putting petroleum jelly on one side of the hull and then added milliput on the other side and pushed the parts together. Afterwards, since the milliput wouldn't stick on the petroleum jelly part, I could remove that half and have a good fit.

And a small dry-fit of the entire assembly so far. She also received the bulwark now. You can see here how the hinges on the legs are eventually hidden by the casings. Since aligning the hole thing would be an issue, I decided to wait with the top plates of the casings. I'll oversize them around a hole and then trim them to size once installed on top of the casings.

For the next post I'll try to put some pictures of some of the tools I've bought and built for this small project.

[marijn van gils]

You really have a talent for coming up with most interesting subjects and displays! I'll be following with interest again!

[Neptune]

Thanks Marijn, the bottle idea has been around my mind for many years... And the subjects I'm currently building do really lend themselves well for special concepts since they are all working at sea rather than just sailing around.

As promised here is some of the tooling and testing I'm doing.

This is the test bottle I mentioned before. I now simply put a small piece of styrene rod inside, to see whether it'll take the heat of the epoxy and also to see how it will look with the distortion of the bottle and the epoxy. This piece is slightly conical in shape as I intended to use it as a monopile in this project. It appeared however too short. So yes, the idea still is to put a monopile next to the vessel. Her deck load will consist of Transition Pieces, yellow conical shapes with a platform that are normally put on top of a monopile and which will then support the wind mill itself.

I also added different diameter wires to see what it will look like for future reference (yes, a potential next project is already growing in my mind).

Here are some tools. I started off with the medium pincer, it's longer than the usual ones, but still too short to reach all the way back for this application.
I then designed the tool with the high handle from styrene in a sort of Z-shape. It had initally only the small part making it more of a 7 shape, but the angle of it wasn't correct, and the handle too high (restricting the angle I could make through the bottle neck). I couldn't reach "around the corner" inside the bottle, the area closest to the neck. I did add the longer stanchion then, to use it for leveling the sand on the bottom.
Given the experience of this one, I designed a new tool with the lower handle, and with an upstanding edge (T-shaped) to keep the rigidity. This allows for steeper angles. I also adjusted the small piece to a slightly sharper angle (keeping in mind that it has to pass the neck of the bottle). This tool does allow me to reach around the corner and is also useful for level sand when kept sideways.
I also bought a set of aquarium/ aqua-scaping pincers of 27cm long, they have small teeth at the tip, which is better for holding stuff inside the bottle and have proven very useful during trials for this project.

And the vessel as she more or less is now (and yes I'm aware the paint needs some touch up and the legs are crooked, that's why the top deck of those leg casings is coming last, I use them to straighten out the top part of the legs):

[Neptune]

As you could see in previous post, that practice bottle looked rather crisp on the bottom, unfortunately the real bottle didn't. During my first filling with sand, I had the idea that a more liquid mixture would create a very flat bottom. I therefore made my mixture way too liquid by adding too much water (which eventually floated above the settled sand. However during that first filling, I made some errors in moving the bottle, which meant the water swooshed around a bit. The water wasn't pure of course, it was mixed with acrylic, and this left some nasty smudges which I can't seem to be able to remove as easily as pure acryclic would be.
I therefore decided to add more sand, with a much heavier consistency (much like the small practice bottle), to cover those smudges.

Smudges

Here you see the fresh mixture, with a rather heavy consistency due to more acrylic, less water and more sand. You also see how I insert the T-shaped tool to shape the sand mixture, from the middle to the end of the bottle I can use it flat, more towards the neck, I need to turn it and flatten the surface with the small extension.

Most of the smudges are covered now, so it's time to measure things up to see how high I can lift that crane. I estimated the height, then use a piece of scrap styrene at that length and insert it. The bottle has a rather conical shape on the inside, so near the neck it is wider than at the end. This was also visible on the sand layer of course. This way I approximately know how high I can make the crane.

The plan is to sit the hull on the bottom with the legs still bent, then get the crane over the aft leg and afterwards raise the hull on the legs. Given my construction that also means the hull will have to go higher during the leg bending and then lower again a few mm over the legs to lock them. That means the crane can not be built to have the full height of the bottle, otherwise I'll get stuck, being unable to deploy the legs.
Doing it the other way around, first the legs and then the crane, is also not an option as the angle to topple that crane over the aft leg will be difficult to accomplish without hitting the bottle top.

On the model itself there are some very typical markings on top of the legs, the white and red stripes. In this scale they would be around 0.3mm to 0.5mm high with the red stripes being thinner than the white ones.
Since I would be unable to paint something straight and consistent like that, I decided to go for a mechanical solution, I would mount discs of 0.3mm (painted red on the outside) alternated with discs of 0.5mm (painted white on the outside) on top of each other. These discs having the same diameter as the legs. I then measured a stack of discs and reduced the length of the legs to compensate for the extra height. Somehow the discs edges weren't perfectly smooth, eventhough I scraped the with a scalpel. Some glue remains also damaged the paint, so I had to make some touch ups afterwards after all.
They aren't perfectly fitting, but from a small distance it came out quite convincing. The top plate of the legs will have to be painted light grey along with more platforms and decks later on.

As you can see I also started the base of the crane and some platforms and structures are starting to litter the deck (I was surprised to find out how many structures there actually are, I thought it was more "clean").

[JIM BAUMANN]

Ahoi Neptune !

Great idea and innovative thinking-- not always a Windjammer eh !!

apropos your stripes ... the discs are a good idea--

have a look at my Lorna Doone build in progress --in particular the very thin lines I needed there

viewtopic.php?f=59&t=376728#p1020370

I am sure there would be a source of a railway lining stripe o r other...
maybe not for this project but perhaps a future projct where 2 colour striping would be useful...?
these guys have an ENORMOUS range... go their home page and search coloir combos...

https://www.fox-transfers.co.uk/transfe ... mpany=2685

[Neptune]

Thanks for those suggestions Jim, however in this case I'm somewhat hesitant to anything not painted, since it will be in a bottle. If those decals would come off or age, there would be no way to fix that once it's in the bottle.
I'm also somewhat afraid of heat by sunlight in the bottle, so I'll be keeping it nicely away from any sunlight...
I'm hoping to find out whether the epoxy turns warm and whether that's going to affect the model in some way by doing my test pour. I don't think so, considering some diorama's posted in the gallery, where plastic models don't seem affected by their epoxy surroundings. However ships in bottles tend to be made out of wood, so better safe than sorry.

As mentioned I concentrated on the crane. I was of course aware before I started the build that without PE the crane wouldn't be perfect. However it also needed to be sturdy since I still need to manipulate it inside the bottle, using long tweezers. The solution was to make it rather solid. If injection molded companies are allowed to make big blobs of plastic for crane's than I'm definately allowed to do that as well.
It was quite a tedious job and far from perfect, but it'll do the job. The corners were made of 0.3mm steel wire, while the lattice in between is made of 0.1mm copper wire, it's easy to cut at length since it's quite soft and I used a jig to get them more or less equal in length.

The jib was then mounted on the crane base using my small measuring device from the bottle in previous post. Since I'll be mounting the crane with the hull sitting down it should give enough headroom to tumble that crane over the aft leg. I do believe the top of the crane will come quite close to the top of the bottle...

[marijn van gils]

Good job on that crane!

[Neptune]

Thanks Marijn.

Little progress. The ship has a lot more platforms and clutter than I expected when I started this. Can't leave all of it off, so I'm making tiny platforms and the rescue boat.
Will soon be rigging that crane jib with some fly fishing binding material.
Next will be the deck cargo to hide that nasty seam. It looks worse on the picture as the hulls aren't entirely pushed together in this picture (I noticed later on).
Also added some brass wire to resemble the mooring winches. The portside aft one will be covered by a platform in any case. I could probably go sharper in details, but then there's also the distortion of the bottle later on, which might not make this worth the effort. It's a first after all...

[Pieter]

Nice project. There's currently one of these at my local shipyard (Damen Amsterdam) and it is one thing to see this in 1/2000 and another to see it in reality. The crane alone is higher than the 70m+ apartment building next to it. These things are huge.

[JIM BAUMANN]

....."" Little progress. "" ......

Pah!

that is decent and painstaking progress

Brav0

JB

[Neptune]

I was just getting up to speed Jim, now some real progress.

I am sacrificing quality for speed a bit, but I guess it's a bit like a Ford carrier, too many new technologies in 1 go... For the time being I did the windows free hand with a tiny tip marker. I later on figured out I could have used masking tape to at least have the top and bottom edge lined up and straight. I tested that, and it worked, but the windows were a bit under an angle. I might use a modification of that making tape-marker combo on the next build.

I added the cargo lashing equipment, which basically are a bunch of clamps to hold the Transition Pieces. Also built those TP's and started painting them. Couldn't wait to have an overview since I'm working on many different area's of the vessel at the same time, so made a small dry fit. It also helps to test fit a few things through the neck to reduce the assembly inside the bottle.

[SG1]

Looking great! the hinged legs are a most clever idea! Am very curious to see all the steps of the bottling process and some pull rods in action. The latest touches improved the already good look of the vessel. Well done!


PS Am sure you have seen and discarded this bottle already. Anyway, just in case you didn't:
https://www.whiskybase.com/whiskies/whi ... othes-1991

[Maarten Sch�nfeld]

What a neat subject for a ship-in-a-bottle, Roel!

Maybe this will inspire to other unexpected modern ships, in even more modern bottles... What about a trashed container ship or oil tanker in a coke or whiskey bottle or like? With a lot of poluted ocean around it?

[Dan K]

I have to say, this W-I-P made me laugh when I first started to read through it.

A ship in the bottle was interesting on its own, and I expected the usual sailing ship because I wasn't paying close attention. A very clever idea indeed, and your execution has been brilliant. A very, very cool project, IMHO.

[Neptune]

Thanks for all the replies, been a while since I've seen this activity over here

Maybe this will inspire to other unexpected modern ships, in even more modern bottles... What about a trashed container ship or oil tanker in a coke or whiskey bottle or like? With a lot of poluted ocean around it?

Although a feasible idea, I've contemplated this kind of things before (as this has been a plan of mine for over 10 years). However, there is one big point against it. Tankers and other modern ships are so large/long that downsizing their length to fit them in a bottle, creates an extremely tiny scale. This brings with it a limited width and height of the vessel and this leads to a rather simple bottling process. With limited all-round dimensions you don't have to fold or assemble anything, you can just slide it through the bottleneck. That makes it a lot less impressive than a normal Ship-In-Bottle build of a sailing vessel.

The reason I chose the Sea Installer was because of its odd length-width-height ratio, the raised crane being an additional plus (not even part of my original idea, as the legs would have been challenging enough).
I guess any modern crane vessel would be suitable, as long as you raise that crane high enough to make it fill the bottle properly.

With this build I went from idea to start of construction within 1 week, which is not what I normally do. However I've decided to live with some of its errors and learn the lessons I've learned from them. At this point I'm still happy I'm trying this, although the bottling process is something I'm somewhat afraid of.

During tests, I've always put one part of the hull sideways and push the other part on it that way. That way you can push, using only one hand/tweezer. She can't really sit upright, since both parts have the legs sticking out at the bottom, so you can't squeeze them together. However, adding all the detail on the sides now, and with the sandy bottom in the bottle, I'm hoping I don't break anything when doing this.

I'm nearing completion now, working on the helo deck. We'll soon find out how this will go
Once/if/when she is in the bottle, I'll start doing a lot of testing for additional features:

- Glass etching, I'd like to etch the company logo and perhaps the name of the vessel on the backside of the bottle
- Epoxy pouring, I'd like to pour in epoxy as a water layer inside the bottle
- Dressing up the bottle, I'd like to dress it up to resemble a wind mill nacelle, with a hub (without blades) over the neck and a stand that resembles the tower.

I only see the above as extra features and I won't try to apply them to the model if bottling was succesful and tests weren't.