: I live in Indiana, and I cannot find any cedar boards over 16', and my kayak
: will be 17' long. I know you can join strips together that do not run the
: entire length of the boat, but has anyone built a boat with all shorter
: strips, and no strips running the entire length. Also, when you join
: strips, do you have to join them at one of the forms? Bear with me, I have
: one more question. All of the cedar boards that I have seen are full of
: knots. I couldn't find one board that was free of knots, including 8'
: boards. Do I have to rip the wood, and then cut of the knots, making the
: boards even shorter? Thanks for any info.

I'm building my 11ft boat (my first project) with 6' Home depot fence boards. I scarfed joined them by setting up my belt sander sideways on a workbench and drew a line at about a 7degree angle (estimated by eye.. the joint is about 3in long on a 3/16" wide strip) then just sanded the adjoining strips until it conformed to the line drawn on the bench. You sand into the face of the strip, so when your done all you see is an edge joint on the face of the boat. Many of my scarf joints just look like a character of the wood, and not a joint at all. Many folks try to match the strips, i.e. join the end of one strip to the same end of the strip that used to be it's neighbor on the board. This achives perfect grain matching and makes it look even more like it is one continuous strip. I think I'm going to call my boat "Random" because that's what the strips look like. An extra 5 points to anyone who can name the literary female the name refers to.

I tried to pick out boards with as little knots as possible, but when I had knots, if they were closed knots and seemed fairly strong (ie didn't break with slight bending of the strip) I left them in the boat.. I think they look cool. If they looked weak or had open spots in them I cut the strip there and scarfed. Also, don't use knots in curvy parts of the boat where you know you will be faring quite a bit. The plane doesn’t like to cut the knots, and the sander has to work alot harder on them as well.

When you are picking boards, especially fence boards, look at the edge of the board... ie the 3/4" edge and make sure you see the edge of the grain (several thin-ish lines running lengthwise) and not the face of the grain (a couple curvy lines that are wider and generally curve back on themselves. The latter is harder to fair, and also is most likely not as strong. That’s something else I learned the hard way on this boat.