I got my router bits from Lee valley and they arrived in New Zealand about 1 week later. I did my strips and I don't think the router bits had dulled at all, they still look new.

I bought my strips pre-cut a little over 1/4" thick by the well meaning wood suppliers. They did a good job and my router bits had no trouble coping with the extra thickness apart from leaving a little shoulder. I guess the extra thickness came from me mentioning that being a first timer, odds on my workmanship would be a bit hairy and lots of sanding-back/fairing was likely to be in order.

Subsequently the routed cove and beads fit together nicely, but the shoulder leaves a little grove at the join. This is not a big deal, indeed with some coloured dookie schmuts, I reckon I could produce a nice pin-stripe effect on the deck. It should be easy enough to sand this back, but because the deck is looking very fair, I am now scared to sand it back because I can only make things worse - so there is some angst ahead for me.

However, it has been war with all the twisting hull strips which will need a reasonable amount of fairing to make good my hack efforts - so swings and round abouts.

The best bit about my pre-cut strips was that they were uniform in thickness and width. This made iteasy to mill the cove and beads on my homebuilt router table set up. That is after I got over all the scare mongering about safety and all . But I sure was carefull and had no trouble. It took me 3 hours to do the beads, mostly coming to grips with setting up my router table with its unique home made fence and feather board system. 1 hour to do the coves and even less if I do it again.

Build on.

Cheers Pete