Fancy Floorboards

Happy New Year.  It has been just over a year since I started my build.  It has also been over a month since my last post, but I have been working on the build.  Most of it has been encapsulating the interior pieces with epoxy so there isn't a lot of new "build" to document.
One thing I have been working on are the floorboards.  They are just 3/8" mahogany plywood, but I wanted to dress them up so I decided to add 1/4" strips of maple veneer to the give the floorboards a look similar to the striped deck of many old woodies.
I used 2" wide maple edge banding that included hot melt glue on the back.  I made a cutting jig that let me cut the strips out of this banding using a straight edge and utility knife.  Here is the set-up.

The banding is slid against a straight stop and some 1/4" plywood is used as a spacer for the metal straight edge. I had to keep pressure on the ruler to hold the banding in place while I cut.  I also kept changing blades to ensure I was using a sharp edge. The longest piece I needed was 34", so this rig let me cut that length. This was a manual and tedious process as I needed about 44 pieces of the maple strips for the floorboards.

This shows what a strip looks like on the plywood.  This mahogany plywood was stained prior to this process to give it a deep, consistent mahogany finish.
To place the strips, I build a 2 3/8" wide spacer out of scrap plywood.  This let me place and hold the strips while I used an iron to set the hot melt glue.

The maple strips are not exact straight. The curve and warp of the maple does not let the strips lay flat or straight. The guide helps aligns them while I held it down and used an iron to melt the glue.   The cut-outs in the guide are for the iron. In practice they was not needed as I could run the iron against the edge of the guide with good results.  After a strip was glued down, the guide was moved against the newly placed strip to align the next.  It worked well and went quickly.  At little trimming and sanding on each end completed each piece.

Here's a completed piece. From the curve on the outside edge you can tell this is a front floorboard. The look is what I had hoped for.  The floor boards are in two halves.  The light area on the right of this piece is a shallow rabbet that will take a 1+" wide maple strip to hold the pieces down and cover the seam between the right and left half.  These will be coated with epoxy, using several coats.  Then I plan to sand the epoxy off the maple and add another couple coats to level out the finish and ensure it is all embedded in epoxy.