About Us

Welcome to Big Ship Salvage! Our warehouse operation is located in Milan, Ohio.  Big Ship Salvage has been in business since 2002 and have grown into the largest inventory of original nautical lighting and related nautical antiques in the US.  It is no secret – we work with some of the largest ship breaking operations around the world, and we buy scrap from the shipyards by the ton! The inventory you see on our web site has been transformed from salvaged pieces to polished working pieces of art! Many people are shocked to learn that from the time we buy our items to the time it lands on the web-site for sale can take as long as 9 months. Most everything is painted when we buy it, so the process of removing the paint and then polishing takes a fair amount of time. Since most items have been removed from a working class vessel being cut up for scrap, we also spend many hours making general repairs.

The company is owned by Jim and Kelly Unger of Milan, Ohio.  Milan is a quaint small town and the birthplace of Thomas Edison.  We are minutes from Lake Erie which is part of the Great Lakes region.

Our warehouse operation in Milan, Ohio is not normally open to the public, but we do schedule appointments for buyers to pick up products if in the area. Please understand, the warehouse is not set up for retail sales, it is a working warehouse operation with a full machine shop for repairing and wiring the lights we sell.

We welcome you to place an order at Big Ship Salvage, you can use our convenient auto-checkout system.  You can also call us at 574-870-1571, or send us an email and we will get back with you.

Feel free to check us out on Pinterest for more nautical ideas! We’re always posting our new arrivals, as well as pinning any creative nautical décor project we see online.