I'm building Jay's Outer Island, which has some decent bends, and is low volume with a flat stern deck. My strip fastening methods have included 2" spring clamps, 1" spring clamps, "Jumbo" paper binders (office supply stuff, also called butterfly clips), screw style C-clamps, hot glue, packing tape, staples, brads and a few wedges. On one or two strips, I had to virtually go through them all in order to find one that would hold the strip.

I'm nearly done stripping the hull, and so far, 99ish percent of it has no staple or brad holes, but I did use them on occassion near the first and second forms and near the last two forms.

I'm not opposed to staple holes.... this is just the method I chose to use, and I'm learning a lot in the process. In fact, I've already told my wife that I'll have to build a second boat, just to take advantage of all the things I've learned on this fisrt go-round, otherwise, it's wasted knowledge. :-)

I may have to build one with staples, though, just so that I have a representative sample in the soon to be fleet. :-)