> Hi All;

> Well, after all the great advice on this board, I guess I'm really
> building a kayak now. I bought the boards, set up the strip cutting jig,
> and produced enough beautiful strips for 1-1/2 kayaks, if I don't screw up
> too many of them during the building process . . .

> For a novice at mass ripping as I am, it took 3 hours of cutting and an
> hour of setup (4 hours total) to produce the 0.235" (average,
> 0.230=0.240" overall) strips. I was shooting for a fat 3/16",
> and like to plane and sand a lot. :-)

> You can view the results at http://www.dbeweb.com/kayak / and select
> "cutting strips."

> Next comes scarfing a few dozen together, and then milling the cove and
> bead in the hull strips. Piece of cake, it's all downhill now! For all the
> other newly hooked posters, try it - - you'll like it.

Great job, and see -- it wasn't hard to actually do it once you got started.

So, where did you hide the sawdust? I hope you saved some. I usually keep a plastic gallon size (food storage) bag full of sawdust from each species or batch I rip so I will have it for mixing with resin wherever I need some filler. Why a bit from each batch? Well, as you can guess, the walnut sawdust would be a bit dark to use as a filler with spruce. I've never needed to use that much, but what I have left over is probably going to go into some fillets on a stitch and glue design this summer.

Don't dismantle your infeed/outfeed arrangement yet. What worked fine for feeding boards into your radial arm saw should be ideal for guiding the strips into your router. The strips, being thinner and far more flexible than the boards, are going to need support even more than the boards did.

You may have to build a box to raise the router table to the same height, but it is worth the time to do so. It can be very convenient when all (or most) of the tools in your shop have the same table height.

A thought here: Do you plan to cut the bead and cove before or after you scarf the strips? I get two conflicting images. One is that if you scarf first, then when you do the bead and cove, the router will cut over the joint and give you a straight line. The second is that if you cut the bead and cove first, you can use small scraps of strips that have matching beads and coves with your clamps to align the scarfed strips while the glue sets up. For this I'd try 1) laying a piece of wax paper on my work surface, 2) wrap a piece of wax paper around a 2 foot long strip's beaded edge. 3) staple that to my work area, 4) assemble the glued ends of the strips and push them over the beaded edge of that waxpaper covered strip. 5) cover the cove edge of a 2 to 3 foot strip 6) Slide that short strip firmly against the scarfed joint and then staple the strip to the work surface. The excess waxed paper can be folded over the glued scarph joint and a weight applied. Let it rest until the glue sets. In this case the matching grooves ( bead and cove) should help align the scarfed ends so the final strip is still 1/4 inch thick, and also straight.

Shoving your boxbeam together will give you a nice worksurface for your scarfing.

Your website mentions that you have some left over ends of material that are about 1 x 3/4 -- and I didn't see any fingerboards in your set-up. The pressure applied by these might have reduced the chatter you observed and permitted you to get a few more strips from each board. I've been successful in running roughly 3/8 inch material through just to get it down to a 1/4 inch strip and sawdust. If you want to try using up these pieces, you might want to scarf them into longer lengths first. Then, when you rip strips from them you will have 3 good strips from each scarph operation.

The first time I cut strips I used shorter boards (8 and 10 footers). Now, I like to work with 2 to 4 inch wide material, which I scarph to length (and then some!) before I cut the strips. The bigger pieces of wood are far easier to align. Actually, I fell into doing this when I started cutting pieces for a Putz Walrus. I needed longer, thicker pieces than the strips I used for my canoe, so I made up the lengths first. Later I cut down some of the leftovers from the Walrus project to give me some beautiful, long, 1/4 inch strips and realized ( Duh!) that the ripping process was far faster than the time I had spent cleaning up each of the scarf joints I had done on individual strips. With each narrow, scarfed board I would hand plane any overhang and mess from just one edge so it would feed smoothly along the rip fence. After that I just ripped away. The second rough edge from my scarfing disappeared like magic. Either it ended up on a strip that was too thin to use, or turned into sawdust, so I never had to worry about it.

Hope these ideas help.

Paul G. Jacobson