Bottle 701 - Fire Truck

From the artist: "I assembled this for a friend at our church who was a volunteer fireman for over 35 years. He started collecting toy fire trucks a few years back and now has over four hundred. I made this for him as a novelty for the the collection. It is made from scratch from wood, paper, aluminum foil, clay, lead .177 air gun pellets, and aluminum tubing. The only parts I didn't fabricate are the wheels, axles, and the dog sitting on the seat. I made the parts so that they could fit through the neck of the bottle and be easily glued together inside the bottle. It took a couple hundred hours to fabricate the parts, because I had no plan and was using toy truck as a model, but putting it together inside the bottle went fairly quickly, only about 15 hours. It was a lot of fun. In retrospect, I can see that I should have thinned some of the paint, more, like on the water pump, where it is so thick some of the details disappeared. Ah well, we live and learn."