: Anybody have a source for good cedar in the central part on NC. I plan on
: ripping my own, but if I can get a good deal on cove and bead strips, I
: might change my mind.

: As an alternative to cove and bead strips has anybody every used a sanding
: table (a table saw ,with a fence, with a sanding disk in place of the
: blade) to put a slight bevel on the strip, thereby eliminating the fragile
: nature of the cove?

I've used a sanding disk on my tablesaw to rapidly square up the ends of my strips before making butt joints. It works very quickly.

If the boards have weathered a bit before being used the ends are discolored. Obviously this does not go away when you rip those boards into strips. The discolorations change a negligible dark line at a butt joint into a 1/2 inch wwide band of darker wood, drawing attention to every joint -- something I wanted to avoid.

I used a cheap wood miterbox to cut off the ends of each strip (3 or 4 strokes with the saw), then I cleaned up the cut with a few seconds of contact with the sanding disk. Very neat joints.

As for putting a continous bevel on the edge of the strip. This would certainly do the trick, but I doubt if it would be time efficient. The angle of the bevel required changes a bit for each strip depending on where around the hull the strip resides. If the hull were a cylinder you could stick with one fixed angle, but on a kayak hull some areas are nearly straight, and others have tight radius bends.

To compound the issue, due to the changes in the curvature of the strip at different places along the length of the hull (and deck) The bevel required changes along the length of the strip. While you could certainly do this type of work with a disk sander, you would probably spend a lot of time in setup. After that you would still need to make small final adjustments with a sanding block or a handplane.

The amount of wood you remove to create a bevel is very little, and a sharp handplane does such a fast job cutting through the soft cedar, redwood or pine strips that it is the tool of choice.

If you want to dispense with fences and just freehand your sanding, you'll have some mistakes along the way, but you should get a good percentage of usable strips after some practice. I think you'll get better results if you work with shorter strips, say 5 to 8 feet long, and you should have some support for the ends. The sagging of long strips (10 feet or more) will cause them to twist a bit as you try to freehand sand them and you'll get uneven results. The strips are so light you can easily support them by just clamping a 4 to 6 foot long 2x4 to your saw's table. Put this 1/16th inch away from the sanding disk and it should be a fine support.

If you go with using a handplane, make a support for holding your strips on edge so they don't slip as you plane them. A couple of foot-long scraps of 1x2 nailed to your work bench, and spaced a bit over 1/4 inch apart should do. Make some small wedges fromscraps of strips and use them towedge your strip tightly between the 1x2s.

If you use a dividers to scribe along the length of the strip as an indicator of how much wood you need to remove, you'll find that this process goes a bit faster.

Hope this helps.

PGJ