: The scarfing doesn't take long, a couple of minutes at most: I cut
: the scarfs on a bench disc sander which is very fast and
: precise, and I have a jig I use for aligning and gluing.

With more jigs you could glue up several strips and have them ready. If you had 8 strips on hand you could get more on the boat each evening.

I tried gluing the scarfs on several strips at a time. I placed waxpaper between the strips so they wouldn't stick to each other, applied glue to the many joints, and clamped the bundle. It was something that I got tired of really quickly. Too many pieces all over the place! And every joint had to be cleaned up on 4 edges.

That was when I started scarfing my boards together, and ripping full length strips from the longer boards. Now I do this mostly for the 5 to 7 full length strips I need to use when starting a boat, and for making full-length stringers for SOF boats. The rest of the strips are easier to make and use if they are under 10 feet long. Since the strips don NOT run the full length of the boat I only need to match the bevel for part of the length. It makes doing rolling bevels a bit less tricky. At the ends of the boat, where the strips will bend and twist, as well as reduce in width, I'll have some fun getting a good fit, but towards the middle ofthe boat the joints are less extreme and the bevel is pretty even. I can fit an end and put the strip in place. then I can fit another strip to the other end, and work back to the middle of the boat. If they are long enough those two strips will overlap somewhere near the middle of the boat. I can mark and cut them anywhere in that overlap area for my butt joint. If I an using fairly short pieces--say 5- or 6-feet-long--I can fit each end, and then put in a third piece for the middle. I'll have two joints on this strip, but they are far removed from other joints on the boat, and well supported by the adjoining strips. If you want to use scarf joints instead of butt joints then the technique works just as well, but you'll need to measure a bit more carefully so you have the right amount of wood for the joint. Again, use the existing mounted strip with a wide clamp to hold your joint in position until the glue sets up. Or, drive a short staple through the scarf joint to hold the pieces together. If you put a board behind the strips you can drive a long staple through the joint and into that backer.

There is nothing wrong with having joints on the edges of forms, though some people prefer them between the forms. With odd-length strips I have the joints staggered all over the length of the boat. When I would scarf individual strips before using them I ended up with the majority of the joints near the center of the boat. When I scarf boards, each strip that i rip has the joint area a few inches away from the previous strip. It is fairly easy to keep those joints staggered when I apply them to a boat. Start one strip at the left end of the boat, and start the next strip at the right end of the boat. Full-length strips are going to be a foot or more longer than the designed length of the boat. The longer they are the further apart those scarf joints will be.

: If they
: were butted that joint would have to be over a rib and that
: would cause problems clamping, as I am not using staples.

Just a matter of using a different kind of clamp. You can use the existing strip to supoort the joint of the two new strip pieces you are gluing up. Sandwich the new strips' butt joint between a couple pieces of scrap wood, and get those scrpas to also sandwich some of the adjoining, existing strip. Pinching the clamp tight lines up the ends of your new strips with the proper height of the previous one, and holds the butted pieces together.

: I
: don't think stapling would be any less time consuming than
: clamping actuaully, just gets rid of the setting time between
: strips.

Stapling is a lot faster to do than setting up clamps. But you lose some of that time later when you have to go back and pull the staples. People who do a lot of staple-less building have lots of clamps and bungee cords so they can apply several strips at a time and keep the bunch in place until the glue sets. On your next boat you'll have solved these problems and discovered new ones :)

Each staple is basically a small clamp. It is out of the way and allows you to place several strips in rapid succession. When you can place three strips on each side every day (a rather easy task with staples) you'll be working three times as fast as you are doing now.

: . . . The time consuming part is planing the bevels which I
: had planned to do with a router; unfortunately I shaped the
: stems incorrectly so the bevel angle has been changing along the
: length of the strip.

Don't beat yourself up over that. I doubt that there is a "correct" shape for canoe stems which would allow you to keep the same angle along the length of the strip. About the only way your angle could stay the same would be if you wer making a cylinder- or barrel-shaped hull. Canoe hulls have flare, tumblehome, rocker, and compoound shapes which are not named. To make strips which fit those complicated curves it is common to custom fit the strips with a hand plane. The wood is soft and easy to work, and the handplane gives the builder an opportunity to change the angle of the bevel along the length of the strip. We call this a rolling bevel.

Routers are only useful if you are planning to mill bead and cove edges on your strips. Routers have too much power. To get a safe work environment with a router, you need ot mount it to a table, and set up a fence and featherboards to keep the strip from moving erratically. The setup time will kill your schedule. If you were producing several strips with the same edge shape--say you were building a dozen boats at the same time--then it might be worthwhile. But with each strip being unique, it would be difficult to do. As for bead and cove: When you get to areas where the angle between two adjoining strips is very great they simply don't match up. You'll get some strange gaps which you'll need to fill with extra pieces of strips.

: I can't work much faster at present, until
: the arthritis settles down again; that comes and goes.

You might want to find someplace which has an old canvas-covered canoe which has had the canvas removed. I think you'd get a few new ideas from those old specimens. They used to use very wide pieces of wood for the sides of the canoes.the planks were proably close to 4" wide. The canoes I've seen tended to have only 6 or 7 of those wide strips to each side. Most of the planks did not run the full length of the boat. At the bow and stern there were other planks set at about a 45 degree angle to the horizon. When oriented this way they could make the bends needed at the bow and stern. Since you are working with plywood you could rip wide pieces of thin plywood to get the same wide-plank effect. The planks were not perfect rectangles. They had to be shaped so they would fit over the building molds, but since there were so few of them the companies made patterns for each one. Just 7 patterns. Make a left- and a right-side version from the same plan. If you didn't have patterns you just needed to fit 7 pieces, and use those as patterns to make copies for the other side. I know I am oversimplifying this. These production canoes were built over a heavy building form and constructing that was a time-consuming effort. But once that building form was made you just steamed and fit a rib to fill each recess, then bent your planks over them and drove in copper nails to hold things together.

Making one of those building forms is on my wish list. It may be a while :)

PGJ