Alphabet soup/ Workshop Illustrator development

On going progress with one of my 'Expand' typefaces, I have found I have learnt quite a lot so far on illustrator, but for this project I have found that I only need to use the pen tool, but even just using this has improved general knowledge about various different tools on illustrator.

 The 'a' was my original hand drawn example of the typeface, for a majority of the letters so far I have found it quite simple to form the rest of the alphabet using the same design, I have had some trouble with certain letters, such as 'h', 's', 'v' and 'z' taking these letters and managing to make them a legible design which follows the same concept has been quite tricky.

I have also had trouble manipulating certain letters to follow the same size structure, if you look at the x-height, many of the letters without ascenders or descenders are larger than the counters of the letters with ascenders or descenders.
This was due to the adjustment of thickness of each character and if I was to make letters smaller or larger to fit the height of the counters, it would really affect the aesthetics of the entire typeface as a whole, so instead I decided to maintain a height and a width for each certain type of letter.