13-11-2015, 07:15 PM
Many years ago when my brother also worked where I did, we made a wooden whale in a bottle. He did the carving and it was clearly too large to fit through the neck. The secret was placing it in a plastic bag to exclude water and pressure-testing it to 10,000 psi (which was routine there and in fact we made the pressure chambers from 16" naval gun shells). That crushed the wood enough to fit through the neck, and then soaking in water expanded the whale again.
