: . . .i've got a good shop, just lacks assembly
: space...which is the main reason i haven't built a kayak yet.

I do my building on the deck next to my garage. between work on my canoe, I covered it with a long blue poly tarp, and that worked pretty good. A few waterspots where rain came through pinholes int he plastic tarp, but those look like the normal variations in wood color. I moved the boat around to the other side of the garage for the epoxying, as I didn't want drips on the deck, and moved it again--this time into the sahde-- for tha varnishing, as I was afraid that varnishing in the direct sun on a hot summer day would cause the varnish to not flow smoothly, and at the same time I feared getting sunburnt. Otherwise, working outside around Chicago went quite well.

: . . .i was thinking about tarping some space beside
: my little shop to do the assembly/build and hoping the weather would
: improve to a point that i could do the epoxy in place...

that should work quite well. You'ld have an open breeze and shade for comfort, and protection from rain.

: i've looked around online and seen pricing for full kits but not for the
: strips. anyone care to share ballpark what i'd be looking at price
: wise...how do they price strips, by the bdf or linear ft like molding?

Generally they price them by the running foot. Generally you can get strips which are 3/4 x 1/4, or 3/4 x 3/16. Most of the time they are already molded with bead and cove edges, which give you a face of about 5/8 (you lose an 1/8th inch to the joint) Figure the circumference of your boat at the widest spot, and divide that by .75 (3/4") or .625 (5/8") to get an estimate of how many strips it will take to go around the boat. If the boat is 45 inches around by the front of the cockpit, ( use a tape measure around the circumference of the form in that area--you can do this on the plans) then you would need 60 to 72 strips. If the boat is goint to be 17 feet long, add on 2 and multiply by the number of strips to get the numer of feet of strips you need. So for this example, it would be either 60 times 19, or 72 times 19, which would be 1140 or 1368. Some people order 10% more, but since the boat gets narrower towards the ends, this estimate includes excess for waste and damage-so I'd stick with it.

I've seen prices for strips going from $.31 to $.39 cents a running foot. You can certainly find more expensive ones, and with a bit of shopping might find some a bit cheaper. Even so, at these prices, with beand and cove strips (5/8 inch exposure) you'd be paying 1368 times 31 cents, or $424.08 plus packaging and shipping. Bead and cove strips have delicate edges on the coved side, so packing can be time consuming--and add expense. If you get long strips--anything over 9 or 10 feet will almost certainly have to be delivered by truck, not UPS, so the costs on shipping can mount, too.

On the other hand: you can get 14 to 16 strips from a 1x6, depending on how big the kerf is on your saw blade. If you skip the bead and cove work (and I suggest that you do) then you'll get your 60 strips from 4 long 1x6's. I'd get eight 10 foot boards and rip and scarf two of them to make two 19 foot boards which were slightly oversized 1x3s. These i would rip into strips, and get about a dozen full-length strips. The rest of my boards I would rip into 10-foot-long strips.

This is roughly the equivalent of ripping 120 strips from the 10 foot boards. Such a job takes about 20 minutes for set up, most of that time finding and placing supports for infeed and outfeet fot he wlender, oversized strips. Then it takes about a minute a strip. I'm assuming a feed rate of 3 inches per second, plus time to reposition the board for the next cut. With cleanup time, figure three to three-and-a-half hours to rip all the strips. If you have a surface plane, then figure another two hours to smooth all the strips, and get them to an exact size. This will save time later on. Tack on a day for ripping and scarfing thefirst two strips. It only takes an hour's work, but you'll need to wait until the glue is hard before ripping strips from your new long boards.

Wear a mask. Cedar dust is not good for you to breathe--and you will be making a huge amount of dust.

10 foot cedar boards for making backyard decks (5/4 x 6) have small tight knots and half of those knots disappear into sawdust or only show on one side (use this for the inside of the boat). You can get this lumber for $14 to $20 a board in 10 to 14 foot lengths, and usually you can find 18 or 20 fott lengths for a greater price. Figure on up to $160 for this kind of lumber. If you look for clear cedar you'll spend more. It isn't necessary. If you can;t stand the sight of a knot in your work, then get a couple more boards of the decking material, rip more strips, and just use the clear wood. You can usually cut out the knots and rejoin the pieces of strips with simple butt joints assembling them as you add the strips to your forms.

The difference? If you can get the wood for $160 to $224, you'll save $200 to $264. For the 4 to 6 hours of work you'll be paying yourself $40 or mre an hour, the equivalent of an $80,000 a year job. If you like that kind of money, get into cutting strips for a living.

: . . planned on machining the strips myself until i started considering
: time saved v. money spent. someone mentioned a minimalist approach...i
: like that especially when you don't have the change to throw around.
: however, finishing for my wife to use on her trip this summer...priceless.

Keeping the wife happy has always been my plan. Tell her you are earning $80K cutting her strips, and for that you expect a steak for dinner. A strip steak would be appropriate. She may laugh at you, but she amy also haul out the grill and tell ya to cook em yourself. Things could be worse.

As for bead and cove. In areas where the strips run straight and have few bends the go on great. But fitting them into compund curves can take a few minutes more time than fitting in a strip with straight edges. In both case you'll need to do some shaping with a plane. but it seems to go more easily when you start with a straight, square edge as a reference. The time spent on making those bead and cove edges is sometimes a worthwhile expense, but not always. A lot depends on the design you'll be building. In my opinion, for one or two boats, it is not worth the time and money for the bits and creating the jigs and setup. If you are building several boats a year, then it makes sense to have a permanent, or semipermanent setup for making B&C strips. That would have to include a thickness planer. Putting a B&C edge on strips which were not all of exactly the same thickness would be a terrible waste of time and money.

the illsutration below is how to rip, flip, and scarf your shorter boards to make longer ones which you can rip into full-length strips.

Hope this helps

PGJ