My friend, the one who let me use his form and hot box, uses a heavy rubber strip on top of thin aluminum for a pressure plate and it makes some good glue lines.

Don' t worry too much about the slid veneer. You can eliminate a lot of glue-up booboo' s by doing some ' creative layout' .

There are at least a dozen mistakes on mine that stick out like a sore thumb. Well, to me anyway. Nobody else seems to notice them. I can' t wait to make another one so I can do a better job of it. Good luck!