: Anybody want to take a shot at this???

Sure. I wrote about this just a few weeks ago. There are two basic ways of stripping. One is to start from the outside and work in, and the other is to start with fairly parallel strips near the center, work out, then trim the overlap.

The second way is usually faster. With some boat designs it can be 4 or 5 times faster (1 day of stripping as opposed to 4 or 5 days.) If you are doing design work the second way (center out) can give you a neater "base" for onlays, and the even strip edges can serve for alignment guides if you do inlays.

Why this is: On a boat you have curves eerywhere. There are darn few spots where you can get two pieces to butt together squarely, so almost everything has to be custom fitted. Such handwork takes a lot of time. When you start stripping your deck with a curved strip as your base, every strip you attach will either need to be bent to the same curvature, or it will need to be planed to fit. AS you get closer to the center of the deck the bending is more difficult to do as the pieces get shorter and the amount of force needed to bend them becomes greater. At that point you start shaving strips into lune-shapes, or dig out the materials for a steam box and spend a day playing with that new toy.

When you start from the center line of the deck, or from some straight line area parallel to that, you can lay down a dozen square sided strips in minutes. Let the ends extend over the end and sides of the boat, and trim the deck to fit once the glue hardens. If you want to give each strip a slight bevel so the strips come closer together, then it is usually an even bevel ( the same angle) all along the entire length of each strip. This can take only a few passes with a hand plane, and goes very fast. If the curvature of the deck is fairly mild, you cna just lay the strips down --no glue or clamping needed-- abd they won't fall off. Dry fit everything then get the glue and put on as much of the deck as you want to do before taking a break for a sandwich. When you come back from lunch, if the glue is dry you can finish the rest of the deck. Let that dry overnight, and trim to fit first thing on your next workday. Faster, neater, and looks really good.

With your design you say the deck is fairly flat. Sounds like the strips, whether bead and cove, or square edged, are going to fit together neatly and quickly if you follow the designer's directions.

Just my take on this. Hope it helps.

PGJ