How do you get a ship into a bottle?

[Refugee]

I have seen two types of these decorative items and some people get quite confused.

The most common type is made of wood and careful study usually shows that the hull will fit through the neck of the bottle. The rigging and masts are all hinged and linked with strings with one way knots and are laid flat as the ship is inserted through the neck. Pull the strings and up they go.

The other type I have seen was all made of glass and is rigid.
These type are made outside the bottle.
The bottle is then made as just a base and tall cylinder with enough glass to later form the neck and top.
The ship being fairly heat proof is then installed into the part formed bottle with a blob of molten glass and allowed to set. Next the bottle and ship is rotated and the bit that is going to form the top is heated and formed with tools as it rotates without allowing the model to get hot enough to melt and come loose.

Are there any other ways these decorative items might be made?

[Alan Douglas]

I worked 47 years at a local company that made oceanographic research instruments, and one of our products was pressure chambers made from 16" naval gun shells. These were 9 1/2" internal diameter and would go to 10,000 psi or with modifications 15,000. We also used these to test our own instruments. For a short time my brother worked there also, in the pressure-test department, and he got the idea of carving wooden whales and shrinking them in the test chamber, which you could do if you put it in a plastic bag to keep it dry. He made one, shrank it enough to fit through the neck of a bottle, then soaked it in water to expand it again. The whale looked a little the worse for wear after all of this, since it tended to shrink more in some grain directions, but it worked well enough to puzzle people as to how it got in there.

[pwdrive]

I had one given to me as a kid, it was a liner with a couple of masts, no hinge points as I remember, inside of the glass bottle was a moulded? sea and a shore line with moulded ? houses etc on it, all painted to suit, the base of the bottle looked as though it had been fused on afterwards.

Lawrence.

[Refugee]

I worked at a place where they made underwater cameras and when they tried to crush an outer casing with the pressure tester the stainless steel outer just came off in flakes.
It never imploded.