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Strip: Tough Bend Tool
By:Jim McCool
Date: 11/27/2001, 9:19 am

I've been working on the deck strips and come up with a novel strip bender/position holder for those difficult bow and stern bends. I took two pieces of ply about 3"x6" approx. Then two 3" pieces cut from a strip. From these I made a collar by clamping the ply pieces spaced with the two strip pieces in the upper half. This collar slides down onto the new strip and clamps onto the hull holding the new deck strip onto the shear (or shear +1) strip. The benefit is twofold. Primarily it holds the new strip into the bend but secondarily it keeps it from buckling over. I rounded the lower (contact) strip piece with a finger plane to match up with the bend. I actually used two of my stapleless plywood finger wedges with two strip pieces and it did exactly what I wanted. Of course this only works on straight up and down bending. JJ.