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Another thought - classical tend to be played with the neck raised above the horizontal. If this suits you best, a long strap attached with a leather lace tied to the headstock might be most comfortable. Then you'd only need one button at the tail.

Check your hand position while playing the high frets to make sure the strap and button don't interfere. All being equal the treble side of the heel is likely to be a good place. If you have a stacked heel, avoid drilling at the glue line just in case the screw splits the joint.

I leave 7 days before wet sanding. This is for ukulele finishing, so the shellac is very thin indeed - I might leave a thick coat longer. Humid weather seems to slow curing. My test is to scrape a less conspicuous area gently with a razor blade - if it's cured enough to sand it feels "crisp"...

Something like this: I knocked it up in a couple of afternoons, though the Swedish postal service knocked the lump out of the top edge. Scraper plane with toothed blade for highly figured wood (in my case and that of the recipient, ukulele tops, sides and backs, less than 2 mm thick, but...

Here's some bookmatching using sapwood (yew, in this case). I think I had some yew big enough to avoid using the sapwood, but liked the effect.

Oops, P1000 indeed! Or a handful of gravel ...

I use shellac as the sole finish on some of my ukuleles and guitars. It's much tougher than you might think once it has fully cured - a bit fragile for the first week, pretty tough after a month. I have a 90 year old instrument whose shellac finish seems pretty indesctructable. Pros: shows up...

That could have gone so much worse! Next time, if there ever is one, you might think about reversibility if using something which is experimental for you. Shellac can be dissolved away in meths, wood dust and hide glue can be removed with warm water, etc. Planning for reversibility is standard...

Going back to the original post, this is where I lived in my teens. Near derelict when we moved in, a bit less so when I left to be an adult. It's in rural mid Suffolk, so gives some idea of vernacular non-urban architecture. The house is late 1500s timber/lath and plaster, with the brick...

Don't try to put a permanent curve in the blade. Just hold it like a cabinet scraper, fingers at side and thumbs in the middle, and flex it as you push. Single sided blade as it's stiffer. You can use a double sided blade with tape on one edge, but they're very bendy and hard to control, and go...

How about using brown shellac to fill? A shellac filler stick, melted into the crack, levelled back with a razor blade. If you curve the blade with your thumbs as you push it, you can limit the scraping to a very controlled area. Then brown shellac polish on top, blending in to the surrounding...

I honestly think that if you can make a perfectly acceptable guitar without the StewMac gizmos, they won't help you make a better one (other than perhaps cosmetically). The steps up to excellent come with the experience of making more (don't think I'm saying you don't have that experience, for...

Try it and see! Most builders I know reckon that they started to get acceptable quality round about build number 20. If you just want it to look like a guitar, maybe, but it has to be a high quality player as well.

Hand made is always a definitional problem. If based on the proportion of wood removed, starting with the tree, then almost nothing has been hand made in wood for some centuries. Maybe we could look at the length of time spent with hand tools as opposed to machine tools, in which case these...

I don't think so. What you don't see, because it doesn't work for video, is the individual attention giveñ to each piece of wood. First in its selection, then in final working. A factory instrument has all the parts machined to spec, then glued up. Job done largely. A luthier instrument...

I'd try hand sanding with a hard block. Any give means the soft grain gets sanded more than the hard (darker).

And the normal rule with oil finishes is that you must get your surface as perfectly smooth as you need before applying - the oil won't fill imperfections, even highlights them. So you might want multiple sanding sealer coats and sanding before you apply the oil. This will help because your...

Pine is a problem because it's really soft, and the pale wood is softer than the darker streaks. I made a banjo uke neck from Pine as an experiment, and applied several coats of blonde shellac, sanding back between coats. Eventually this gave me a hard enough surface so that I got something...

Or suede handbags, even cheaper.

No 80 scraper plane? That would be my weapon of choice, and quicker even than power sanding through the grits I reckon. There's a small learning curve to sharpening it, but almost none to using it.