Steam, pressure, and patience.

I essentially have an inside an outside mold that gets loaded with a wet piece of wood sandwiched between slats of spring steel and heating blankets.

As the blankets start to heat, the wood starts to soften and can be slowly pressed into position starting at the waist and moving out along the bouts. This takes a bit of technique as you need to move quick before the wood dries out and stops being pliable, but you also need be patient otherwise the wood could break from the forces.

It’s a balancing act that is actually a lot easier than it sounds.

Cool to hear that you’re dipping your toe.

The top plates can get glued up a handful of ways, but the basic premise is even crosswise clamping pressure and downward holding pressure. Most important part of the operation is the glue joint.

Simple jigging would be to clamp one half flat to a work board (with cauls obviously), dry fit other half and clamp a rigid fence (maybe a piece of ply or scrap wood) a bit behind the end of the loose half. You’ll need to prep some small wedges to use as your side ways pressure, and when you’re ready to glue, you’ll put your glue sides together and fit the wedges together pushing them past each other; see figure 1. From there you’ll probably want some hold downs to keep everything from buckling, so I recommend throwing another couple pieces of wood across your workpiece with some clamps; see figure 2.

Try to keep your top a uniform thickness. You can usually do enough tweaking with the braces to accomplish what you need soundwise. Keeping the top flat and even will help keep you from sanding a hole in an otherwise perfect piece of wood.

Pro tip: before you glue your piece, throw a strip of packing tape down underneath. As long as you’re using standard wood glue, nothing should really stick.