Hiya Joe,
I'm the "bubble-guy" in the above post. The first two times I did veneer overlays on boat decks, I did it two different ways. The primary thing is you need to get good clamping pressure. On one boat, I did deck patterns (large) along the entire deck, and I epoxied them in place while the panels were still separate. That allowed me to use clamps to get even pressure over the entire piece being epoxied in place. The up-side to this is that the edges are in very good/close contact with the surface, and you can then lightly (repeat lightly) bevel/feather the edges, and attain the appearance of an inlay. It worked very nicely on teh first boat. The boat I had at R2K2 was done by putting the veneers on the deck after I completed the construction of the boat. It was extremely difficult to apply the veneers and obtain enough even pressure to get the edges to lie perfectly flat/close to the deck at all points. The result was that I was not able to bevel/feather the edges of the veneer pieces because I would sand through the veneer itself, and the underlying epoxy is, of course, clear. Voila, the design disapeared from the deck in a small pile of sawdust, but there was still a tiny suporting ridge of epoxy beneath it. It was hard to tell when and where this would happen, ie., I couldn't always tell where the veneer was and wasn't flush (until it was too late). The alternative was to just apply the glass and hope for the best, and as was obvious to many, resulted in bubbles trapped along some of the edges of the veneer. Oh well.
I did a ridiculously exotic (though beautiful in the end) veneer design on a Coho this winter, and I swear it would have been easier to have built the plywood face from scratch using veneers than to screw with the problems of the overlay alignments and feathering. But a veneer banding strip is a great idea and should go pretty smoothly, and I suggest that you use the method that gives you the best clamping advantage. I am currently doing a Tern with an edge banding that I made and ripped to 1mm thickness, and intend to actually inlay it. The inlay bandings I could purchase were too thin for inlay work on a boat, and I want to find out which is less of a PITA.
ClampClampClampClampClampClampClampClamp is the best advice I can offer. And, if the trim strip is light in color, be double extra careful when feathering the edge.
Cheers,
Bob W.