OK.  Time to back fill some of the steps leading up to shooting the lacquer clear coats.  First up is attaching the neck to the body.

I spent a bit of time while cutting the neck tenon and mortise ensuring that the neck would be aligned with the guitar’s centerline and not stick out a funny angle.  Even a little misalignment can cause the strings to stray from proper alignment with the fretboard and pickups.  So before gluing the neck in place, I spent another evening measuring, mocking up, and testing.  To my surprise, the headstock end of the neck was angled slightly clockwise in relation to the guitar body.  Even a half a degree of angle seems to make a big difference with how the strings cross the body of the guitar.  You can compensate for some alignment by shifting the tail-piece, bridge, and pickup locations to correspond to the neck, but this would mean that the strings would not run down the centerline of the guitar’s body.  Best to get it right from the start.

A bit of sanding gave the range of adjustment that I needed.  But this resulted in the joint being slightly looser than I wanted.  I added tape shims on either side of the tenon to test fit, prior to gluing on thin cherry shims.  One shim went where the green tape is on the photo below, while a corresponding shim went on the opposite side, close to the heel of the neck.  This provided the slight rotation that I needed.  After sanding, these shims were only a few hundredths of an inch thick each, but that made all the difference.  One of the shims is shown in the photo below, prior to being glued in place.

The resulting joint was tight and as straight as I could get it.  Once again, hide glue is used to attach the neck.