: You better be around when I start stripping my Night Heron this winter, Paul.

Sure thing. I'd love to visit. Just e-mail me a month in advance and tell me which snowdrift to pitch my tent next to. If you want to strip the left side of the boat, the right side will be mine.

: Your instructions are clear and easy to understand and I suspect that I'll
: have a few posers to ask. I'm still trying to decide what wood to use.

Cedar. either red or white. It is easily available, you cna pick out a few color variations, and anything harder is a pain to sand.

: I
: had to do some milling today for a renovation client and learned that
: milling the strips with my Bosch table saw will be a breeze, assuming I
: use a sharp blade. I've been known to push the limits on blade wear,
: causing people to stop and wonder if they should be calling the fire
: department.

I believe it was John Monroe who offered the advice that many saw blades don't need sharpening as much as they need cleaning. Pitch, sap, resins accumulate on the blade, and bake on from the heat of friction. He suggested using oven cleaner on the blades to remove the accumulated scum. The cleaner blades cut with less friction and, from a couple of reports, cut like new.

The Bosch should have ample horsepower for riping 2 cedar strips at a time. Mount a pair of 7 1/4 inch blades on the saw's arbor, with spacers between them. Each pass through the saw gets you two strips. This is basically the same as using a dado setup without having the chipper blades between the two outside sawblades. I've heard of people using three blades, but personally, I'd have a hard time keeping that many strips separated on the outfeed table so they wouldn't flop around.

: I visited Windsor Plywood recently and drooled over their exotic wood supply.
: Pricey, even the end cuts they sell by the pound but man, some of them are
: going to look great when I do my inlays.

Save your Loonies. Head for the wood pile. Cordwood is a great source for the smaller pieces you will be using for inlays. Cheap, available, and provides a wide range of colors. You can always burn the mistakes.

You'll probably find that local suppliers of firewood sell short logs from a wide variety of species.

Sometimes they'll give it away rather than haul it. For example, last week a friend talked to her neighbor, who was removing a black walnut tree. The tree cutting service was happy to bring her 1 1/2 cords of fire wood rather than truck it to a dump site. Splitting some of the logs reveals some fantastic colors in the heartwood. After splitting the logs in half we will mount them on a sheet of thin plywood and run that through the table saw to get small boards for a coffee table top and a cutting board.

The illustration below should show this.

: My thought on the inlays is to
: cut right through the deck and inlay solid wood accents . . . I'm figuring
: on two years to complete the Night Heron solely because of the amount of
: inlay work that I want to do on it.

It shouldn't be that long. Strip the deck completely first, but don't glass it. Spend your winter making your designs on the workbench --or even the kitchen table--from smaller pieces of wood. This is scrollsaw or coping saw work. Kinda like making a jigsaw puzzle where you get to decide on the shape of each piece and then cut it to fit. The little pieces are glued up to make the complete design.

If you want a pair of matching designs, or mirror images, make them from stock which is 5/8 inch thick, then use a band saw to split the thing in half, and you'll have two matching designs. Flip one for the mirror image. Making maple leaves? Work with even thicker stock and you can cut three or four out of your original glue-up.

When you have that, you set it on the deck, with some soble stick tape and walk around it for a few days to decide if that is where you REALLY want it. Then pencil around it, cut out the deck inside your pencil lines, and use files and sandpaper to enlarge the hole into a perfect fit. Cedar works easily. Then you just glue in the whole inlay at one time.

What you want to avoid is having to fit lots of tiny pieces directly into the deck, one at a time.

Hope this helps

PGJ