bracing a top, or, am I afraid of something?!

Bach on the track ...well, almost. I'm still dealing with photo upload trouble, it took half an hour to upload these and I still don't have a slightest hint what could be going on. And I hope I can manage to get the old pictures back...
But as I patiently managed to upload these pictures of the bracing process I thought I'd go ahead and get something together to keep things going.

The bracing process was very exciting for me. I have never build an x-braced top before so it has been a very enlightening experience on what it does to a guitar top plate. As I wrote sometime ago I learned guitar making in the spanish tradition and build classic and flamenco guitars. So I am used to work plates 2 mm thick (or maybe thin would be the better word?!) and very lightly braced with fan braces.
My top plate is a german alpine spruce of  AA quality with medium wide grain and sanded to a final thickness of 2.8 mm. The braces are german alpine spruce, too but a very tight grained AAA quality.
I made the braces very high before I glued them on and wanted a lot of "room" to allow me to lower everything and check how the top changes. And I was glad I worked that way.
I took three attempts of cutting the braces down, shaping them and always listening to the top and feeling the stiffness in between. Then I declared it finished but a few days later I cut the braces down even further and reshaped them.... The process of bracing the top is a struggle. You want the top to be sensitive enough to vibrate freely yet stiff and stable enough to resist the torque of the stringtension for years to come. A perfect balance between these two extremes will make a good guitar top.