Bill,

Yes I'm staggering the junctions, intuitively it seemed like the right thing to do but that's a great point about the bends. I've gotten really good at scanning for micro defects on repetitive steps, or put another way...making the same small mistake several times in the same area adding up to a big mistake.

Case in point...around the scarf joints, the wood actually dropped in height...it was barely noticeable until I put a tape measure against it...but just in the span of 2 feet, it dropped about 2mm in height which created a void that I would have to replicate for every section of wood above that.

So what I did was to plane that 2mm down the length of the strip (or at least as much as made sense...then rechecked the height of the strips at every station...I'm back down to about a 1mm variance which is workable, but I'm glad I caught that early. Losing 1mm on each of 15 strips would have been a mess to deal with by the time I got to the 10th strip.