Ripping Strips

I picked up 3 flat-grained 1 x 6 x 20ft cedar boards at Phillmore Enterprises in London, ON. They had some nice stock in long lengths and Roy is probably the friendliest lumber dealer you'll ever meet.

I wanted to attempt to rip the boards into strips at their full length so that I had more flexibility when it came to laying out how they would be placed on the boat. My basement shop is just over 41 ft diagonally corner to corner so it was a challenge. Fortunately, my tablesaw is on wheels and could easily be placed exactly in the center of the room. With the help of some roller stands and sawhorses, everything could be moved through the tablesaw with relative ease. With the saw set up with a thin kerf rip blade and a couple of featherboards (I recently picked up a magnetic featherboard by magswitch which really made adjustments between passes through the saw quick and easy), it was time to get ripping. Here is a video of how that went:

The plan is to use a book-matched pattern of strips on the kayak so I was careful to lay out the freshly cut strips in the order they came off the board and everything was numbered accordingly for future reference. It's amazing how flexible and fragile-feeling a 20ft strip that's 3/16" thick is so extra care was taken while handling them. After the beter part of a day including all the setup, the job was finished. Here is the result:

Next task: Sorting the strips and storing them, inner stems and prepping the forms.

Thanks for reading!