Accent Strip

I decided to put some accent strips on the Freedom. For this, I am using a thick band of American walnut with thin strips of Alaskan yellow cedar on either side of the walnut. These woods should contrast nicely with each other, as well as with the wrc of the hull. I used the same wood (walnut, ayc) for the stems).

Since I couldn’t get full length strips of walnut and ayc I decided to use butt shorter strips to each other. I had all of my wood cut from when I ripped strips of wrc, so when I got to where I wanted to put in the accent I was ready to go. Almost. Upon closer inspection it became obvious that the walnunt was planed super great and there were a few “kinks” in the strips. I had to take my 7’ strips and cut them into shorter strips to get rid of the kinks, so they were going to be more butt joints than what I’d like. I wasn’t too concerned about looks, I find it’s easiest to use only 1 butt joint: it’s less work.

For the first side I worked on, I decided to glue down a 1/4" wide ayc strip. This turned out to be pretty tricky. I got it in place and let it dry before gluing in the walnut strip. I thought this was needlessly difficult so I decided to change to a new tactit. I took all of the remaining strips and pre-glued the 1/4" ayc strips to the walnut. After a few days of gluing and clamping strips on the bench I had something like 7 different sections of various lengths (because of the walnut strips that were shortened) ready to go on the hull.

I put one or two sections on at time. The clamping was difficult because the 3/4" wide walnut + 2x 1/4" ayc sections were quite stiff for bending.

The accent strip was looking pretty good but there was another problem. By doing the strips in sections, all of the butt joints lined up together. I hadn’t thought about that. It doesn’t look ideal but that’s the way it goes sometimes.  The end result was quite satisfactory for me though.

I’ll need to spend some time cleaning it up when I’m sanding the hull. For example, I have one section where the ayc is not flush with the adjacent strips. Either the strip was too thin or it was glued on incorrectly (most likely cause). I’ll just glue another thin ayc strip over top of it and then plane/sand it flush. Another thing I first started noticing at this point was some gaps between strips. This is caused by two things. As I think I’ve mentioned before, some of my wood was not planed all that well. This resulted in having strips that weren’t of uniform width. Secondly, the stiffness of the ayc/walnut/ayc sections made for some difficult bending even in areas where there are only gentle curves.

In the end it looks good. I don’t know which method I would use again in the future: build sections or glue in thin strips separately. In hindsight I think I would return to gluing in separate sections.