: . . . when I started cutting the 8 foot boards I found that thickness
: of the strips varied. Both ends of the strips were ok, a 1/4 inch thick,
: but the middle four or five feet were thinner, measuring 3/16 or 7/32.

sure, you can use these strips as they are, but you will pay for it later with many extra hours of sanding. Eventually you'll have to bring down the 1/4 inch thick areas to meet the narrower areas in many places around the hull. This is particularly true near where pieces of your 8 foot strips join. Since you want your joints staggered, the odds are that you'll have a 1/4 inch thick, bulging, joint sitting between the middles of two adjacent strips -- and you'll have to sand away 1/16 th of an inch (1/4 of the strip thickness!) to get each and every one of those areas fair.

Since we know that 3/16 (and thinner) strips will work just fine, why not go back to the table saw to get strips that may be thinner, but will be more even in their thickness?

Set up your saw to rip strips that are 7/32nds, or a bit thinner. This will still leave you with some low areas where some of your strips came down to 3/16, but the difference here will be much easier to fair in later. Set up two featherboards, one in form of the blade, and another behind it.

Using featherboards to hold wide boards against the fence when ripping strips has a problem: you have to constantly readjust them as the strips are cut off and the board gets narrower. This time, though you can set the featherboads up and leave them alone. The strips going into the cut are all pretty close to the right size to start with, so the featherboard on the lead-in side should have enough "flex" to compensate. And all that is coming out is a thinner strip and copious quantities of sawdust -- no other board between the strip and the fence this time -- so the featherboard on the output side can really hold that strip in place.

The wood you'll remove from each strip is narrower than the thickness of the sawblade, so the saw blade is not going to be "buried" inside a piece of wood while you are cutting. Be VERY CAREFUL working around the blade. The chipping action of the sawblade as it removes the extra thickness of the strips may give you a rough start on some strips, depending on how tight you have those featherboards. If you get a few really bad ones, just cut those strips an inch or two shorter before you install them, to get rid of the bad spots.

If you have a sanding disk for your saw you can use it instead of a sawblade. use roughly the same setup, but leave enough clearance between the fence and the sanding disk so that the thick end of a strip can get started. You may need to slighly angle your fence to achieve this. Adding a 1x4 or 1x6 board in front of the fence, and inserting a thin wedge between the fence and this wood will allow you to set up a slightly angled feed so the thick wood strip goes in, and after some sanding action a thin, smooth, strip exits.

Getting your materials to a consistent size will save you time later on in your construction.

Hope this helps.

PGJ