: I'm trying to get myself mentally prepared for the task at hand, I have books
: on order, rounding up tools and material sources....

: This is going to be a long project. Isn't it?

: Are we talking 2-300 hours using a book and plans? Getting my mind around it
: and happy I have two glass kayaks to tide me over.

My daughter and I built a stripper from a few planks of wood and a table of offsets in a year, which was slightly longer than our original target.

I've no idea about hours, but my guesstimate is that I spent approaching 200 hours, and my daughter approaching 100, but that doesn't count the number of hours that I spent thinking about what I was going to do when I next got some time on it. It occurs to me that although you need some idea about how long it might take, the act of building a stripper is immensely satisfying as an activity in its own right, and to me the hours spent on it became almost irrelevant because I was enjoying myself so much in the process. If I hadn't enjoyed the process of building so much, it would never have been finished.

However, it seems to me that the real determinant of hours will be your aspiration: What do you want to get out of it? We accepted blemishes in the finished product because we knew that we didn't have the patience to get everything right, and because we wanted to get out on the water. For others some of the things we accepted would not have been good enough.