: . . .I think I may make some
: strips alot narrower maybe even 3/8 for the part where it needs
: to twist and bend into the keel line. I am a little nervous of
: doing a beed and cove on such a narrow strip though. Joe

then don't bother with bead and cove edges on the thinner strips. They don't need it.

With bead and cove edges on a strip cut from 3/4" thick stock, the exposed face of the strip is about 1/8" narrower, or roughly 5/8". If you cut your "thin" strips to be half of that, or 5/16" then two of the thin strips will fit exactly in the space of one of your thicker ones.

Strips as thin as 5/16" will be very easy to bend into compound curves.
With flat edges on these thin strips it is a very simple and fast matter to plane them into long wedges. Glue these long wedges to the ends of some of your strips and you will create flared strips which help to fill the wider areas that need to be covered. That reduces the need for cheater strips--in effect you are adding many thin cheater strips--and the thin slices blend in well with the grain and color of the nearby strips, making them less noticeable.

Rip some of your strips in half (roughly at the midpoint, but just a 1/16th to one side or the other) with the bead edge against the fence, and some with the cove edge against the fence. That gives you 4 types of thin strips. you'll get fatter and thinner strips with bead edges, and fatter and thinner strips with cove edges. Each of the strips will also have a flat edge. If you try to match the left and right pieces from an original strip you'll see that the whole thing is now thinner than your other strips by the thickness of the saw kerf. But, if you try to match a "fat" cove piece with a "fat" bead piece then you might have something which is the same size,or maybe a bit wider than a regular strip. Hopefully it will be wider. Then you can plane the flat edge of either half to get it down so the pair of them matches the width of one of your standard strips. you only need to do this at one end. If the other end is wider, it reduces some of the need for a cheater strip. If you want to insert square-edged cheater strips, you can make them, and then insert them between the square-edged pieces of your split strips.

So, the process becomes: end a regular strip in the middle of a form, about 3 to 5 feet from the end. Continue from there with two thin strips (one with a cove edge and one with a bead edge) which match the regular strip width. Create a long thin wedge with square edges. It will be 3 to 5 feet long, depending on how far from the end you are starting, and taper from as much as full strip width down to a point. Put glue on the edges and sandwich this between the flat edges of your split strips.

The thin split strips will bend very easily to fit in compound or extreme curves. The tapered end of that thin wedge is also gooing to be very flexible in the curved areas, but it loses flexibility as it gets thicker. Fortunately, at the very end it doesn't need to flex much, and the added width helps fill in the open areas as a cheater strip. if it works right--and a lot depends on which design you are building--the strip which follows may be able to run straighter, and need less bending. Tacking on a short length of scrap strip as a spacer will let you get an idea of how wide to make that long wedge in order to achieve this. That is another reason for making some scrap strips from cheap construction lumber when ripping the cedar strips. Staple them on as spacers and clamping strips, then discard them as you add the cedar strips.

Hope this helps.

PGJ