The second and third strips comprise the center bout, and after a few failures I resorted to modeling a thick pasteboard template on a carved belly. The first two bends are internal, and can be seen on many an original instrument; they are mostly covered by parchment reinforcements.

The following four bends can never be seen as they are done on the outside, and are subsequently removed by the outer carving:

Most of the work is done now: a number of alternate internal bends are now done, so as to obtain the right heights for the archings at the inner and outer gluing margins: