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 ...

In his warehouse in Philadelphia sits Jonah Eaton's 42ft (13m) wooden boat. Over the past eight years Eaton has devoted much of his life to building the vessel by hand, with scores of volunteers ...

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 ...

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 ...

Press photo Since Soviet times, the Polar Odyssey maritime club in Petrozavodsk has made exact replicas of 17th-19th century sailboats. In three decades this group of enthusiasts has constructed more ...

A trip to a museum in New England about 25 years ago resulted in a new hobby for Jack Bickhart and a bonus for those who take the Kingsmill Garden Club’s 1990 homes tour May 12 for the benefit of ...

It’s not a lost art, because the Giesler family never really stopped building small wooden pleasure craft. Once the norm in boat building in decades past, other firms building wooden boats moved on to ...

As Peter Rea holds a battered wooden ship model in his hands, he marvels at the secrets it holds. The model was used to build a 60-foot-long ship, called Mystery, in Erina Creek on the New South Wales ...