: . . . I'll try
: running the B & C with my 1/4" bits on 3/16" strips. It was
: good to hear that it would work. The rolling bevel sound awfully hard to
: do.

If you make furniture then you have used a plane. Nothing tricky about a rolling bevel, except the name. since the wood strip sometimes twist along their length as they are applied to the forms, the joint with an adjoining strip may not be perfectly square. Sometimes you need a 5 degree bevel at the center of the strip, but at the end of the strip a 7 or 9 degree bevel is needed for a tight fit. So somewhere between the center and the end the bevel will measure somewhre between these two extreemes. You eyeball it, slice off a curl of wood and check the fit. Touch up the area that is not tight with another pass of your plane and it will come out great. It really goes faster to do than to describe. Since you are working by hand, instead of having everything locked down before working on it with a power tool, you are a lot more able to do these freehand moves. The cedar is so soft that you could do this with a piece of coarse sand paper if you didn;t have a plane. Redwood is about the same to work with.

: So going from 1/4" to 3/16" strips really doesn't make for a weaker
: boat aye? Can somebody explain that to me? Like a glass composite boat?

The hull of a kayak needs to be strong enough to hold its shape. And that is it. A very thin piece of cloth is strong enough to keep out the water as long as the frame it is on is stiff enough to support the fabric.

With a wood-core boatyou have the possibility of failure of the components from (usually) a limited number of possibilities. The big fears are punctures (which let in water and the boat capsizes) and hull crushing (which can happen when a small boat is caught in a heavy water flow. Canoes and kayaks in river rapids may get caught between rocks and the water flow will fold a boat in half. Some paddlers have died after being trapped in boats which pinched them in. Otherwise, bangs and bumps may cause the fiberglass sheathing to flex more than the wood, and delaminate, weakening the boat. Or, a severe bang or bump might actually break the wood in the core.

What some of the tests have shown is that wood panels which were very thin flexed a lot more than thicker panels. When they were tested for impact damage it seems the thinner subjects flexed and deformed momentarily during the test, and then returned to their original shape. The thicker panels didn't flex as much. Instead they broke the wood fibers in the cores. After the impact these damaged areas were easy to see and they did not return to their original shape. With enough force all the panels eventually broke, but the difference in breaking strength between the panels made from 1/4 inch wood and those made from 3/16 and 1/8th inch wood showed that the thinner panels could take almost as much abuse as the thicker ones. Half the thickness was not half the strength, but maybe close to 90%. Sam McGFadden did a lot of the testing and he should be able to point you to his date, if it is still online.

If yiou are thinking of making the hull from redwood, then the discussion is moot. That weighs about the same as cedar and works about the same. You can use either 1/4 or 3/16 strips as you please, and plane them by hand, or bead and cove them. For a single boat, particularly a first one, set-up time for the routers, and time for running all the strips through, is about equal to what you'll spend planing each strip by hand.

The weight of the deck is not great, and differences in strip thickness will not affect the weight of the boat greatly. I'd stick with 3/16 for everything.
the curvature of the deck is petty even, and here you can either plane all your strips to a fixed 3 to 5 degree bevel, or run them all through the bead and cove process.

Your biggest timesaver is making sure the strips are all exactly the same thickness before you bead and cove them. If the wood is not the same from strip to strip then the bead and cove will be offcenter on some strips. A surface planer is almost a must.

Rip your strips from all your wood sources on the same day, and plane them all on the same day. Then run them through the router to bead and cove them in one batch. That way you won't get variations from using different setup.

If you don;t do bead and cove, Make a jig for holding your strips on edge and you can plane them in a jiffy. Cut a 3/8th slot in a few scraps of 2x4 and fasten these along the edge of your worktable. Or, rout out a 3/8th groove along the lengthe of a 2z4. Plop a strip into the groove and use small wedges (cut from your scrap strips) to hold the strip in this groove while you plane it. Hit a wedge with the plane? no problem. It is the same soft wood as the strip. It won't dull the tool.

Just some thoughts. hope this helps

PGJ