Graduating the front part III

I am now at ~5 mm everywhere. Some places in the lower an upper bouts are a little less. The front plate now weighs 429 grams.

I have been doing this now with the graduation punch, the pencil gauge and a scraper. Mostly with the latter two. I find it easier to use  the pencil gauge to mark up high spots. My process is as follows:

1. Start with a clean plate
2. Set the pencil gauge to the desired thickness
3. Scribble around the late. I follow the top and make sure the wooden peg is touching the plate and that it is perpendicular to the plate. Once I have gone over the whole plate I still mark with a pencil the areas where I should not remove material any more.
4. Start scraping. I scrape all the pencil marks away but not much more. I tried to ensure that the circles marking the low spots were drawn on the thick side so that I could remove those too.
5. Once the plate is clean, start again from 1.

It is not quite uniform, nor is it exactly 5 mm. But I think it is close enough for now. Maybe I will move to the back next, hollow it out and start the graduation. Once both plates are fairly close I can then fine tune and match the tap tones of the plates. I am not quite sure how important it is for the tap tones that I have cut the sound holes already. And in fact maybe I could finish the sound holes next. Will need to think about this a bit.