I’m happy … luckily, my worries were unfounded. After about 24 hours of clamping, it came out almost completely flat and the glue line turned out to be perfect .

I applied the glue on the veneer with a roller:

A thicker layer, spread with a piece of cardboard goes on the maple top:

Then, I sandwiched this between two boards of 3/4" thick MDF to divide clamping pressure and attached all of my 12 clamps:

I left this for an hour, removed all clamps, cleaned up the excess glue and masking tape (at this stage, the top was curved due to the increased moisture content caused by the Titebond glue) and then reclamped everything for another 24 hours. After that, the glue was completely cured and the top came out way better then I thought it would, almost completely flat:

Cutting out the top safely outside the body contour showed the following glue line:

This is the cut out top from the front:

And this is how it looks from behind:

And another side view:

Up until this point, I’m very pleased with the results of my work and I got some of my confidence back. I took a long time figuring out how I would do this and took great care while glueing, still turned out to be pretty exciting, but in the end I was glad to see the preparation paid off.

Currently I’m figuring out how to align this correctly to the body core. I will probably glue that together tomorrow.