Earlier quoted context omitted.
I helped a friend make his. He got this insanely hard piece of wood for the neck and we spent a good couple of days shaping that. I'm pretty sure that if you were to look closely at that attic today you'd find that dust unchanged, that wood will never rot. It was also very heavy, a small off-cut would not float. I have no idea where he got that wood, I really should ask him because that probably makes for an interest…
How did the blade of your plane handle that wood?
Very badly. In fact all my normal (woodworking) tools went blunt without much progress. Eventually we settled on doing it like this: use a very thin saw to mark out the stations every 2 cm or so for depth + 1 mm, then use a belt sander (graciously borrowed to us by the father of a friend) to take it down to the marks, then endless hand sanding until it was good. It looked absolutely gorgeous when it was done. I don't remember what kind of wood it was though, the amount of dust was staggering. On one day I accidentally left the door to my attic bedroom open and everything inside was covered in dust. That beltsander did a great job though, and I don't think we'd have pulled that off without it.
If I had to do this today I'd use a metalworking mill. There is no point in trying to work wood that hard with regular wood tools, they just won't keep an edge.