The physical properties of a plastic scintillating strip with axial wavelength shifting fiber and VLPC readout have been extensively investigated. Different construction techniques were tried and 18 variations on the basic detector were studied in a cosmic ray test stand. Over 15 000 cosmic rays were recorded per scintillating strip. The high event statistics and the greatly improved photostatistics provided by the VLPC readout allowed us to study the system in much more detail than has been done previously. Results on light yields, signal uniformity, attenuation length, edge effects, and crosstalk are presented. Typical light yields were 18 photons per mm of scintillator traversed for minimum ionizing particles. The detectors had very uniform response at different positions along the strip.