: My teenage son and I are each building a kayak. I am building a Great Awk and
: he is building a Guillemot. I am a little further than he is, but progress
: is being made. Or, I should say, progress was being made. I screwed up and
: we must start over on his boat.

: We are using half-width strips to work our way around the chines of the
: Guillemot. We have 5 regular strips leading up from the shear line to the
: chines and then switch to narrow strips. They work great at working across
: the chine. However, the problem I had was in using these strips at the bow
: and stern. I need to bend the strips to follow the curve of the boat and
: twist the strips to line them up with the previous strip and the stem. The
: twisting is the problem. The narrow strips don't clamp very well and there
: is little width to staple. In my screw-up, the strips un-twisted while the
: glue was drying. This caused the strips to be grossly out of alignment.

: Since relatively little work had been invested so far, I didn't want to
: "work around" my error. We made the collective decision to strip
: off the strips already put on the boat and start over.

: The problem is this. I don't know how to avoid the problem again. I sure
: could use some wise counsel from the members.

: Thanks.
: Chuck
I'm in the eprocess of making a Guilly and I had similar problems. A thin strip can be stapled to the form by straddeling the staple between one half of the previous strip and the chine strip. To get the strip to conform to the tight curves of the bow, I took some old climbing rope and cut it into sections that were long enough to go around the form where I was having trouble getting the strips to hold. I then made sure the rope was wrapped around the boat but over the form, and then I stuck a long piece of wood in the rope and made a tourniquet. This seemed to work great, except that it slowed the construction project down some because I had to wait for the glue to dry. Sometimes I could only do one strip a day. Hope this helps,
Dave