Go back through the archives and spend a few days looking up previous posts on this subject. Lot of pictures there, too.

Get acouple books on building with strips. David Hazen's has a great section on ripping strips, and good photos. Gil Gilpatrick's book on strip building canoes is also good on the subject. (On a budget? Ssearch amazon.com for these names and get the info about these books, then hit your local library to see if they can find it for you through interlibrary loan.)

Don't mill all your strips with the bead and cove. Keep some with square edges. There are places where the square edged ones work better. A few people actually prefer using them thruout the construction.

In addition to Ross's comments, I suggest flipping the boards end for end after cutting each strip. What was the tail end of the board for the first strip becomes the top for the second strip, the tail again for the third, and the top again for the fourth. Why? well, by rights it shouldn't happen, but when you keep feeding the same edge into the saw, time after time, for some reason the last strip that comes off is a long wedge. Flipping the plank costs you nothing, but you will cut the planks more evenly.

One other tip: before you start ripping your strips, rip one or two of your 1x6s in half, giving you roughly 1 x 3s and join two of these together to get a narrow but very long board. I'd make a diagonal cut 24 inches long across the ends of each of these, the apply glue to this diagonal cut, and clamp two pieces together. From 12 foot 1x6 boards you would get 22 foot 1x3s.

Set up your ripping with your 12 footers and after you have the hang of it, grab one of these 22 footers and feed it through. You will get much better LONG strips this way than by trying to scarf two 12 foot long 1/4 inch strips. You should get 6 or 7 full length strips from each of those 22 footers, and that is about what you would want for your first strips. having a few more might be nice, but you really don't need to make them ALL full length, as you would just have to trim them down later.

PGJ