Official Luthiers Forum!

I am so glad to hear I'm not the only one who fusses & worries until the heel is finally flush fit to the sides.
I have spent a lot of time drawing & redrawing cutaway shapes & find its much easier to get a pleasing shape on the cutaway side if I shrink the width on the treble side upper bout. (sometimes, right to the waist) It doesn't take much, but can help to avoid the awkward look, so many cutaways have.
As far as Venetian vs. Florentine... It often depends on the shape of the body. Some body shapes lend themselves to one or another, while some look fine with either, as long as they are well balanced.
Venetian is much less work, once you get the side bent. And as previously mentioned, when you break a side, it's time to build a Florentine. Only happened to me once, (with a really cranky piece of high runout sapele) but it worked out great.
I do have a good size stack of broken practice sides from figuring how to get the Venetian bend.

I have my homemade Fox style bender set up to bend a very abrupt Venetian cutaway with a tapered-flush heel. This was an absolute pain to do in a reproducible way on a hot iron (although I still have to touch it up on an iron) The cutaway, which is a really hard a radius-ed bend, is much less apt to fracture now as well. In the future I think I will be creating a steel framework to tension the bending-slats during the bend which should help hold the sides harder to the mold which should cut down on the need for touch ups afterward.

For whatever it's worth..

Regards, Peter