The Church Hydro

I've just about finished the manifold training on most of these plants. I've been experimenting with different methods of securing the limbs to the armatures for training. I'm doing this so early so I'm concerned with finding something firm enough but gentle. I tried bent copper, wire ties, and ended up with the rubber band solution in the photos. I'm thinking I may move these up to the flowering buckets/shelf next week. I've followed the manifold technique taught at growweedeasy, but am trying one change in this grow. GWE's technique has me let each half grow and then trim except for 2 stems(+leaf) at node 1 and 2 stems(+leaf) at node 3. This is recommended because they grow laterally at 1 and 3 and stacked on 2 and 4. The change I am making is I am not trimming off the top stem(+leaf) at the second node. That would send up 5 stems on each side. The reason I'm trying this is I damaged 2 or 3 embryonic stems during training, so I wanted to have an alternate branch ready to utilize if the plants don't recover from the damage I did. Later I don't know if I'll trim extra healthy branches or try to accommodate them all; ScOG grid is already set up for 48.