What: I build wooden model ships. Who: Damian Valentine, 81, of Chandler, is a retired service manager and electronics business owner from Illinois. How the collection began: I started building them ...

Jayne Smith's grandson, Preston, is 5 years old and seeing the Great Lakes and lake freighters for the first time. He's from Mesa, Arizona, and there's not much water there. "With the big ships, his ...

On Saturdays, as Tony Colton builds miniature ships that will eventually sit inside narrow-necked bottles, the first question he gets from visitors to the USS Constitution Museum is usually the same. ...

When the late Charles Parsons took on the task of building a model ship, it was no small undertaking -- generally taking him between 18 months and four years to complete. With painstaking detail, the ...

For Michael Stoddart, building a ship in a bottle all comes down to finding the right vessel. "My experience is that you need to have a bottle that inspires you," he said. "A nice, clean bottle which ...