SAN DIEGO — Some carpentry buffs spend their retirement years building birdhouses, furniture or jewelry boxes. Tom Kottmeier had bigger plans. The 76-year-old San Marcos resident has spent much of the ...

For decades, Thomas Kottmeier has been driven by one obsession: to build a wooden replica Viking ship. He thought about it, studied, practiced, talked about it with his family at dinners, and found ...

BASS RIVER TOWNSHIP - At 4 p.m., the workday is over for the 1,500 or so craftsmen at the Viking Yachts boat works. The line of cars waiting to make a left out of the factory parking lot onto Route 9 ...

Justin Anderson, from the left, Jaz Sipila, Oliver Swenson and John Finkle work on various features for a traditional, 27-foot-long Scandinavian rowing boat June 1. The vessel is modeled after a ...

Building Viking shields is not the thing most teens spend their time on, but for one Aurora high school student the work was a perfect fit. For his Eagle Scout project, West Aurora High School senior ...

• Diana Dretske is a historian curator at Libertyville-based Dunn Museum, operated by the Lake County Forest Preserves. She writes the Lake County History blog for the Forest Preserves. This is her ...

Monumental ship burials had a wider and deeper past than we thought.