: Minneapolis - St. Paul

I've seen prices on bead and cove strips range from $0.28 to $0.40 a foot. You would need to add on tax, shipping and packaging.

In round numbers: If you needed 1200 lineal feet of strips and you could buy them at $0.25 a foot, then you would pay $300. At that price there are some other options to consider. Usually it is cheaper to buy a small tablesaw (some are available for under $100) and the necessary cedar boards and cut your own plain-edge strips. (That would be about $200) With careful shopping you could also buy an inexpensive router and the bead and cove bits, and just about break even with the cost of premade strips for one boat. Of course if you are making 2 or more boats and rip all your strips at one time, you could then sell the tablesaw and router at a garage sale (barely used) to recoup those costs, and have a real deal. On the other side of this idea is the time involved in doing this work.

I did a little searching on the web and found some possible sources of materials in your area. I have never dealt with these people, so I can neither recommend them or condemn them, but they turned up on my websearch:

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Vacation Sports
4461 Lake Ave. S.
White Bear Lake, MN 55110
(651) 653-7401 (800) 361-0032
email: info@vacationsports.com

their webpage is: http://www.vacationsports.com/canoes.phtml

They don't have a price online just for strips, although they say they do sell them. waht they do mention is that they have kits for 15.5 to 18 foot canoes which include strips, glass cloth and resin for $599 to $699, which could be a very good deal for you if you want to build a canoe! If you used different plans and the same materials, though, you could easily build a kayak. The idea would be to see what comes in each kit, and see how closely the kit matches your needs for a kayak. Most places that sell kits also have additional pieces for sale which they use to replace broken or damages parts from kits -- so I suspect they should have a good supply of strips on hand.

They also have a real deal for people from the Twin Cities: they will loan you a strongback if you buy your materials from them. If you are building one of their canoe plans they'll loan you the forms, too! Free!

Whether these prices seem fair to you, or not, you might want to get in touch with them. Perhaps they will cut you a deal on the price of the materials if you offer to give them your boat forms for their collection. Hopefully they would see the advantages of having an addtional design which they could later make money out of, by lending them out for others to build from.

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You might also contact Mark Hansen, in the Grand Marais area.

This blurb about him came from a DNR release (http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/volunteer/novdec02/enterprise.html)
about Minnesota people who use the woods:

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FROM KAYAKS TO COFFINS, MARK HANSEN CAN MAKE JUST ABOUT anything out of wood that he harvests from the forest near his North Shore home.

I’m doing what I used to do in fourth grade," says the owner of Hansen Boat Works. "My work now is just an extension of my old treehouse days."

Son of a Lutheran pastor who taught him his craft, Hansen is a founder of the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, where he teaches others to build skis, toboggans, snowshoes, birch-bark canoes, paddles, kayaks, and umiaks (wooden-framed boats covered with skins). "It’s all stuff you need, that has a function," he says. "The casket-making course has been pretty popular. We’re all going to die."

Hansen built about 100 toboggans last winter and six pairs of skis for sale. Each year he turns out a half-dozen boats, from kayaks to fishing boats.

"Most of the boats I build come right out of the forest," he says, "so I’ve got a small portable mill that I take out into the woods on a toboggan. I’ll buy a tree, go out and fell it, and saw up just the kind of boards I want. I’ve got a couple of sled dogs to pull the load out. There’s a pretty small footprint on the land logging with dogs, almost a leave-no-trace kind of situation."
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Check out page 26 of this Feb. 2002 issue of HUT!, the magazine of the Minnesota Canoe Association. There is a list of the board members, and they one who is in charge of ( of all things) Building. There is an e-mail address. Hopefully, you should be able to e-mail this person and get more details on suppliers in your area.

The back page of this .pdf document also has an ad for:the Boat House, which sells boat building supplies, and gives a 5% discount to MCA members. If you are ordering over $500 worth of materials you might want to join the MCA just to take advantage of the discount

http://www.canoe-kayak.org/hut/Feb02HUT.pdf

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Hopefully one of these leads will help you out. Good luck with your project.

By the way, what are you planning to build?

PGJ