Today I got into planing the top to thickness in earnest. Things went slowly at first but little by little I got more and more comfortable with using the plane. I'm still not done; at this point the top is still over 3mm thick. I have to rework the burr on my cabinet scraper to get the grain truly smooth once I'm close to the desired thickness/stiffness. I will say that this is a much more satisfying process than using a drum sander, especially once the wood starts coming up in ribbons with a thickness equivalent to a sheet of paper. I don't miss having to wear a respirator and still dealing with the sawdust. Here a picture early on in the process. Later on tonight I went back to it and had enough curly ribbons on the floor to fill half a garbage bag.
I can tend to get a little burnt out if I work on something too long so eventually I put the top up and focused on shooting the joint for the back. A couple of questions came to mind after I'd eliminated all the gaps and the plates passed the light test:
1: it looks like the sides were mismarked somehow. I had the same issue with the top: the grain of each side didn't perfectly reflect the other. Eventually I decided to go with what looked the best. In the case of the top, it looks like one of the sides was flipped and the grains don't match. What do you think?
2: I'm also debating on how to insert the center stripe. For my first build I routed out a channel but I'm thinking of just laying the plates face down and pressing both against the center inlay line. Would the latter way be correct? I honestly don't know because most Martins have that spruce center stip inside the soundhole.