I've done it both ways and each way has it's advantages. Even after you have accounted for the added time to mill a cove and bead on all your strips, the C&B system has a slight time advantage. You get reasonably tight joints everywhere without much added work. The C&B also helps keep the strips aligned with each other. Keeping the strips aligned helps making fairing easier. The C&B does this automatically.

However, with practice you can probably get tighter joints by hand beveling. In some situations the C&B keeps the strips from making truly tight joints. This is especially true where there are rapid changes in curvature and really tight radius cross-sectional shapes where the self-aligning feature of the C&B causes the strips to align in an orientation other than what you really want. My Expedition Single has problems with C&B in the stern on the bottom where there is a skeg shape that requires a lot of twist in the strips. This area is actually easier if you hand bevel, because you can make the strips so they naturally lie at the correct orientation.

With my Guillemot family and Night Heron designs you would need to hand bevel virtually all the strips with continously changing rolling bevels. You can get away without beveling the bottom between the chine and the keel. The deck does not require much beveling, but one pass of the plane will produce tighter joints.

The Auk designs require less beveling particularly on the deck.

In synopsis. C&B will generally be easier, accept for a few places on some boats. With care hand beveling will produce tighter joints.

: A while back I got the Gilpatrick book on strip canoes and he suggests just
: planing each strip, rather than doing the whole bead & cove routing
: thing.

: I'm sure that some of you have tried this - how has it worked for you? Is it
: more trouble than it's worth?

: (my woodworking experience is more than beginner, but less than intermediate.
: For you WW people out there - I'd say that I'm a Class II+ woodworker.)