Fortunately I have been able to see some wonderful examples, a.o. from a fellow coursist, and I enjoyed the good and timely advice from the folks over at Chiff and Fipple. All this information, and my own interpretation of it, of course :-) , got me an embouchure that got it right from the start.
Unfortunately, the wood proved to be too porous to sound the lowest note (at that time the instrument was still cut to a 'C' at full length). The wood was far from airtight -- suction tests sucked big time -- so I finally decided to go with my teacher's suggestion here and have the (as yet untreated) bore varnished (vs. oiled with linseed). The immediate result was a solidly playing base note!
Normally the rules with embouchure cutting is "if it sounds perfect, don't touch it", but this time I wanted to learn by copying the measured diameter of the original. So I spent the following classes on gradually widening the oval embouchure hole and re-working it to keep it sounding well. This worked out pretty OK, although of course now it's too late to compare it with my initial attempt.
Next came the finger holes. I drilled them before cutting the flute to 'D' size -- this wasn't what I wanted, but because of a few communication errors that's what happened, anyway.
The right hand section went OK, but when I spent half of the class finding an '8' drill for the left hand section, I eventually drilled the wrong hole with it, directly after I had found it. (It was inside the drill, where I had left it myself.) Oops. Fortunately, I had also made the left hand section a tad longer than on the Rudall plans, to have some spare trying to adjust it from its said 442 Hz to somewhere between 435-440 (in which range I believe the button box is tuned which I accompany), so that eventually countered it. I think I subsequently moved the other holes somewhat more towards their original position, which actually left me with a fairly comfortable fingering (I'm used to a stretch, though), with, after tuning, the three left hand section's holes around the same size. No sweat here... :-)
The next week I crudely cutted the instrument to 'D' size. A bit too crudely to my own liking (but let's just say there was another communication thingy going on), resulting in a flute that was already too high in the second octave (IIRC).
To balance the octaves, I had to expand the bore at the end, for which I intended to use the same (metal) reamer that I borrowed to ream the foot section. Unfortunately it wasn't available at the time, so I ended up using a Clarke's Original (well, the Victorian, actually) with a bit of sandpaper around it. It took much more reaming than I had expected! On the original drawings, the bottom expanded from 10.5 mm to 10.7 on the bottom 'C' -- a hardly noticeable increment. On my instrument, the bottom 'D' eventually expanded from ~12.5 to ~14mm I still don't know why it's different; my current theory is that the taper matters more on the high end of the flute -- a reason why some bores flatten towards embouchure.
Now, after a week of sulking over the crude 'C foot' amputation, I took my griefs back to class to my teacher, who, cheerfully, told me that it all sounded quite OK, a little too low actually, and I should stop looking at the needle of my tuner, but use my ears instead. So after another evening of tuning I eventually came around and didn't feel too bad about it, at all.
But the real test was to play with my group, so I took my unvarnished flute to band night, where it actually got quite a good reception. It was loud, and the F sharp was in tune (as opposed to my French, baroque style flute), which actually made some tunes in 'C' harder to play on it :-)
The sound was also quite OK already, although somewhere between the embouchure widening, the finger hole placement, the foot amputation and subsequent flare reaming, I had lost my solid bottom 'D' (which is kind of a quality mark with Irish flutes). I hope to get it back when it's varnished overall; especially the varnish on the expanded flare and on the embouchure hole still could make the difference. (I may also have to sand the inner bore once more to remove unevennesses in the varnish.)
The pictures I took over this period are unfortunately all quite vague:
Right now, the flute's already up to it's next stage, which is being varnished all over. I eventually opted for this kind of finish instead of linseed oil, because it adds a nice hard layer to this vulnerable softwood. Again, my teacher's doing the actual varnishing, so I feel a little bit naked right now without my flute. I hope that when it comes back it will be the looker that I worked so hard for, and that the smooth overall coating will return me a solid bottom 'D'. Fingers crossed!
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