Hi Kent,

Just to add that I found soaking the strips for a week before steaming helped a lot. Also to address another point that came up about gluing further down this thread: I did not wait for my strips to "dry out" before i glued them in place. In fact i glued them up immediatly with yellow carpenters glue and had no adhesion problems at all. I guess it was just ignorance on my part of 1.) not realizing that using the glue on "wet" strips could be a problem (luckily for me as I say there was/is no problem and 2.) did not see how I could hold my strips to the complex curves I was doing without gluing them permantly in place and 3.) the whole steaming and stripping of this complex curve already took a long time, so I did not consider to prolong it even more with waiting for it to "dry" (hopefully in the right shape) before gluing. Anyway i just did not have any problem with gluing right away with yellow carpenters glue. Maybe I was just lucky for once :-) By the way from your e-mail address i wonder if you are in the Navy (perhaps the Canadian) ?? Not that it has to be so or else I would be in the "Yahoo" I guess ...

Good luck, Arthur