Ready The Long Boats!

I stumbled across a new technique while digging through the photo's on the Yahoo forum.  I won't mention which one since SIB builders on the forum are a humble folk and don't usually take a liking to drawing attention to them selves and this blog is very public.  Did I just say take a liking?  Wow too much study for my up coming talk like a pirate day post.  Any way if you want to find the inspiration for this post dig into the yahoo forum photos and you'll find it.  As well as a lot of other inspiration, the yahoo forum files and photos have a lot of good stuff.  

So this post is all about turning a match stick...

...into a long boat small enough to fit on a dime.

Long boat's, dingy's, life boats what ever you want to call them they are a fun accessory to ships in bottles.  Trouble is making one small enough to look the part.  Here is a fairly quick and easy method.  I say fairly because lets face it your dealing with super small parts and it can get tricky.

First take your match stick and mark out the size you want your boat.

Then sand the end.  It is important to leave the boat on the match stick at this point since it gives you a place to hold on while you cut and sand.

Next use a dremel to cut the spaces between the seats.  I usually use three cuts but do what you think looks right.  

The end result should be something like this.

Once that's done sand down the middle seats so they're just a little bit lower.  This makes it look like they are seats in the bottom of the boat.  

Now get out a separate match stick.  This one will be used to create the side of the boat.  Use a razor blade to cut a paper thin strip of wood.  This may take a few tries.  

Cut out two small strips.  

Cover the whole side of the ship with glue and glue the strips onto the sides.  This is important since you'll be sanding on the boat and if they aren't glued tight they can come off.  Also glue the strip so it sicks up a little above the top of the match stick.  You want it to look like you can actually sit in it.  

Now sand the boat into shape.  This is one of the hardest parts since it is so small so be patient with it.  

It is finally time to cut the boat off the match stick and do the final touch up sanding.  You may need to add another strip of wood to the back as well to match the height of the sides.  

Once the boat is off the match stick it will be much harder to handle so try to do most of the sanding while it's on.  As far as the back of the boat goes I like to taper up the bottom and sides just a bit to give it a good shape.  Pretty much just make it look like a boat.  

Congratulations your done!  From here it can be painted stained or just glued onto the ship.  

Thank you for reading and have fun building!

Split Hulls and Deck Accessories

I'm back!  I have a lot of material from my current build to go over so this will be a some what extensive post. I want to cover a couple of things this time.  First split hulls and then how to make some deck accessories that will add detail to the ship.  

This is the beginnings of my current build which is the most cliche ship of all time, the pirate frigate.  It would take a blog post in and of its self to explain all of the carving that went into this hull but for this post the important thing is the split.  

Here is the ship split.  Splitting the hull enables you to put a bigger ship into a smaller bottle.  This gives the illusion that there is no way the ship could fit in the bottle much less the mast and sails.  With this ship I've used the channel to hide the split.  The channel is the raised section of wood that goes horizontally across the hull.  The channel is used to keep the stays from rubbing against and breaking the rails of the ship.  When the ship is put together the channel will hide any creases between the split.  

This is after I applied the paint.  I use acrylics mainly.  It's easy to clean up, cheap, and it looks good.  In order to create the fine lines of gold paint I dipped the very tip of a toothpick into the paint and applied it by drawing it on like a pen.  Where it was over applied I let it dry and put the brown paint over it until it looked right.  The hull still splits it is just stacked on top of the other in this photo.    

These two shots show more of the deck.  I drew in the planking with a fine point sharpy.  I also added a hatch and a long boat.  I regret that I didn't get more pictures of these before gluing them in.  I will try and go over them more in a later post.  The hatch is made in much the same way as the other parts.  I painted lines across the hatch vertically and horizontally so it looks like a grate.  I then used my fine point sharpy to fill in where the holes in the grate would be.  I then glued a frame around the hatch and sanded it down so it wasn't coming up to far.   My general rule for applying more wood to any section of the ship is to add more and sand down rather then to get it perfectly cut the first time.  

As for the long boat I cut out a small block of wood and sanded it into shape.  I sanded off the corners in the front first then rounded the bottom finally rounding up the front and back.  This will take time and patients since the boat is so small.  I don't worry about carving out the inside it's to small for that.  I turn it upside down and glue it onto the ship.        

The next thing I want to go over is anchors.  I love putting anchors on my ship.  I like the detail they add.  I make all of my own anchors out of wire.  This way I can make them the exact size I need in order to fit my ship.  This is especially helpful in ships of this scale since I've yet been unable to find anchors that you can buy for such small ships.  I've outlined all of the steps below. 

Your going to need a set of needle nose pliers to do this the smaller the better.  Use plenty of wire you'll be cutting off the excess in the end.  Clamp the wire in the middle.             

Then simply fold it in half. 

Clamp the wire together just below the end.  The top portion that is not clamped together will make the eye of the anchor.  

Then decide on the size of your anchor.  For bigger sizes I like to twist the wire together for added strength.  When you get real small this become impossible.  

You then want to bend the ends around the needle nose.  The closer you get to the end of the needle nose the smaller the loops will be so use that to decide the size you want this part of the anchor to be.  

 Then trim off the ends and make final adjustments according to how you think it should look.  Another SIB builder who I shared this idea with added a little strip of wood on top that is consistent with real anchors.  I didn't add this until I saw how well her's turned out and have since included it.  It can be a pain to get it to glue just right.  As always have patience and keep trying.

 I now want to go over a very popular accessory to ships the cannon!  A pirate ship would not be a pirate ship if it did not have cannons.  I use two methods of canons on this ship the first is the cannons in the side of the ship.  For these I used wire insulation with the wire taken out.  This works well because it has the hole where the cannon balls come out so it adds a little bit of realism there.  For these I drilled into the side of the ship and glued them into place.  That to me is the simplest way to add cannons to a ship of this scale.

 I also used a more complicated method for the cannons on deck.  Unfortunately I ran out of room on deck or I would have added more.  In any case for this method I used a dremel to sand down a tooth pick into the shape of a cannon.  The simplest way to explain it is sand down the middle section and then round off one end and keep the other end straight.  This takes time and patients as well.  It is hard to hold and sand such small parts so take your time and work with it.  

 The next part is to make the base of the cannon.  Cut out a small rectangular piece of wood and glue two toothpick sections for the wheels.  Then glue the cannon on top.


















 This picture just shows the cannon on the deck of the ship.  The other cannon will soon be glued down on the other side.

Thank you for reading I hope this has been informative.  I will be posting more on Ships in Bottles and this particular build later.  If this blog has inspired you to build your own SIB please email me a picture at siemensbottelingco.gmail.com.  I would love to start a followers gallery and show off your work.  Thank you again for reading.