I've heard from more than one person who told of routing their own beads and coves, and said that they didn't quite get the cuts centered. This resulted in gaps when they put the strips together.

I was thinking (my wife would say "Uh-oh.") Suppose your router bit wasn't exactly where it needed to be in relation to the edge of the strips. Say it was just a little too high or low. If, when you routed the edges, you marked each strip to show which side was up or down when it went through the router table; then, when stripping the boat, you made all of them match - in other words, have all of the "up" sides face outside, and the "downs" face inside (or vice versa), wouldn't that prevent any problems with the beads and coves on adjacent strips not lining up?

Let me know if this would work before I get started. Knowing me, I'll be lucky to get the router bits at exactly the correct height. Should I go to the trouble of marking all the up sides "up"?

Of course, I guess that would mean I'd have to get the bead and cove bits exactly the same height, but I was thinking that might be possible if I didn't mess with the height adjustment on the router - just push both bits all the way in and tighten. (Would bead and cove bits bought from the same company have equal shaft lengths?)

Are these the kinds of things one wonders about before one actually has any experience at building a stripper? My only experience is with a stitch and glue. I cogitated long and hard before each step of that construction too.