Thanks, Marc. Good advice.

At the risk of truly beating this horse into the ground, my thought process started with the observation that in an SoF kayak, the frame defines the shape and provides the structure, while the skin just keeps the water out, so each aspect can be optimized for its intended purpose.

With an S&G boat, the plywood is structural, but also acts as a mold for the production of the fiberglass and resin skin. Given that, I assume that there's probably more wood than you need for the final structure, but removing it would involve additional steps and material. So why bother?

With a strip boat, though, I was wondering if it would be possible to just not add that (presumably) unneeded wood in the first place, and if so, whether that might make it easier to build or have some other advantage. While normally I'd assume that if this was a good idea people would already be doing it, it seems to me that even if replacing some of the wood with foam or something similar made it easier to build, designers like Nick and Rob wouldn't be interested because their goal is to produce the beautiful wooden boats that they show on their Web sites.

So my initial question wasn't intended as "hey, is this a better way to do what you're doing?" but rather "is this a possibility for accomplishing something somewhat different from what you're trying to accomplish."

So summing up, with an S&G boat you don't need to build strongbacks or forms, and you don't need to do a ton of work on your wood underlayment before you glass it up, but you're compromising on the design. With a strip boat, you can get an ideal design, but now you're building strongbacks and forms, plus you need to do a lot of work on the wood underlayment. What I was wondering, essentially, is if there's something in-between - could you build strongbacks and forms to enable you to shape panels that don't themselves need a lot of finish work.