: If the inlay had been perfectly straight, the tablesaw-cut diamonds would
: have fit perfectly the entire length. But, because of the curves, probably
: 8 out of 10 had to be adjusted slightly to follow the path. I have a
: feeling the coves are hiding some gaps that will become evident later, so
: sans-cove-n-bead might be better - more work to fit, but easy to see gaps.
: I'll probably try that next time (if I remember not to mill all the
: freakin' strips ahead of time).
: The inlay technique is straight from One Ocean Kayak. However, I couldn't get
: a good smooth line with the saw cut, so I cut shy of the line and evened
: it up with a microplane - that worked great.
: Ross
I feel a little qualified to comment on cove & beadless detail work after doing quite a lot of it on my boat.
I precut all of my pieces and assembled them off of the boat then put the whole detail on at once and continued stripping around it so I didn't have the same requirement to fill a certain size hole.
If (when) I do it again, I would like to assemble it on the boat as you have done, cutting each piece to fit. I think if you precut all your pieces you would have a lot that wouldn't fit to your satisfaction.
Also if you do it without bead and cove I would recommend using thicker pieces for the detail and then fairing them down to match your other strips. On my boat I was able to clamp all of the pieces down to a flat surface and felt like I had pretty good control over their position. Still though I had a few that were too high and a few that were too low. The overall thickness of the detail, if faired properly would be the distance between the top of the lowest piece and the bottom of the highest piece......I'm even loosing myself in this description.
In summary, bead and cove help you keep all of the strips level with each other, without bead and cove, you may want to use thicker strips and then plane them down when fairing so that you don't have to plane/sand the whole rest of the boat to match the thinnest part of your detail work.
Sorry about the long description 
