For the AiroLite project, I think poplar will work just fine. Platt recommends using spruce, and poplar is pretty similar. All you need to ba able to do is to steam bend fairly small strips of wood to fit the ribs and station molds. I have his video (I'm planning on building a canoe for my daughters), and it looks like anything other than the most brittle types of wood will work just fine.

For the stripper, a similar response. The strip building process is unbelievably forgiving in the area of wood selection. For the amount of curvature that most strips are required to make, everything from black walnut to balsa seem to be usable. You will have tradeoffs as to the final mechanical properties of the boat with each type of wood used (strength, weight, durability, aesthetics, etc), but you can make a usable boat out of just about anything.If you have enough wood, I might recommend building a simple canoe like a Rob Roy before tackling a kayak. This will give you the experience with the process and the wood before getting into a much more complicated kayak. It will also give you one more boat to play with.

Good luck, and keep us posted on your results.

Jeff

: I came across the Plat Monfort AeroLITE canoe plans cheap and easy. If I
: have good success with the canoe I want to build a strip built sea kayak.
: With all of that said my questions are I have a ton rough sawn planks of
: poplar is it suitable for the type of frame for the Aerolite canoe and for
: a compleat strip buit kayak. All of the research I have done I have not
: seen the mention of poplar as a suitable building material. Thanks