I'm not manually doing any stripping or anything like that. When the .deb gets built it takes care of such things in debian/rules. You can look at my build scripts here:
http://www.freemoe.org/users/jebba/scratchbox/kernel/

If you are just changing the .config, I suggest trying out my scripts and replacing my debian/2.6.28/rx51-custom_defconfig with your .config.

Have fun.