  Recently Azaria et al have studied strips of the Kagome-lattice in the
weak-coupling limit, where they consist of two spin-half chains on the outside
weakly coupled to an array of half-integer spins in the middle. Using a number
of mappings they have arrived at the interesting result that in this system all
spin excitations are gapped but there are gapless spinless modes. Here we study
these Kagome strips in the limit where the interchain couplings are comparable
to the coupling to the middle spins by density matrix renormalization group and
by a strong coupling analysis. In the limit when the coupling to the
middle-spin dominates, the 5-spins of the unit-cell reduce to a single S=3/2
spin, and the overall system has well known gapless spin excitations. We study
the phase transition from this phase to the weak-coupling phase. We also carry
out a strong coupling analysis away from the S=3/2 limit, where the five-spin
blocks have four degenerate ground states with S=1/2, which can be thought of
as two spin and two pseudospin degrees of freedom. A numerical study of this
strong coupling model also suggests a finite spin-gap.
