The next step in the top carve is creating the neck and pickup planes.  The neck plane, especially, is one of those ‘get it right’ moments.  Gibson uses an angled neck on many of its guitars to compensate for the high, adjustable bridge.  If the neck were parallel to the body of the guitar, the strings would get progressively higher above the fretboard as you moved up the neck towards the bridge.  This would make the guitar almost impossible to play higher on the neck.  But if you angle the neck too much, then either the strings will not clear the fretboard on their path between the nut and bridge, or the bridge would end up unreasonably high.  The “correct” angle for the neck plane is around 4.4 degrees.  Some of this depends on how accurately you carved your deck, but you don’t read about many people using an angle less than about 4 degrees, or more than 5 degrees.  Here’s a diagram I borrowed from John Catto on lespaulforum.com.

The most common approach to cutting these planes is to use a hinge jig in combination with a router sled.  A hinge jig is simply a box frame, sized to fit around the guitar body.  It is attached to the table or base on the front edge so it can be tilted up to the desired angle by lifting the back side.  Zero out your digital level with the box lowered completely down, then lift the back edge up to the desired angle and secure it in place.  I used a free level application on my Android phone to measure the angle.  This was less than ideal, as the sensor in the phone caused the reading to jump around a lot.  I did my best to split the difference in the readings and get close to 4.2 degrees (4.2 is the angle that ExNihilo uses, so I went with that for starters).

You can see the two screw holes that were used to secure the carve templates in the area of the pickup cavities.  I marked the location of the end of the fretboard (the mark just to the left of the left screw hole) and my estimate of the end of the neck plane cut (the mark almost centered between the two screw holes).  I calculated this distance using an on-line angle/distance calculator on my Android phone based on a 4.2 degree angle and the depth of the cut at the edge of the guitar (this is the distance between the top of the deck and the top of the binding.  Using a few passes of the router, I crept up to this depth.

Here you can see how some of the contour steps are erased by the neck angle plane.  I pretty much nailed the end mark of the cut, so I must have been pretty close to the 4.2 degree angle.  The next cut is for the pickup plane.  This cut starts where the fretboard ends and stops just before the bridge location.  I lowered the angle for this cut to approximately 1.8 degrees and made the passes with the router.

Once these angles were cut, I sanded out the rest of the steps, doing my best to blend the contours.  Care should be taken not to create divots in the edges where the binding will go, or to overwork the neck and pickup planes that you just created.  The maple is incredibly hard wood, so even using 80-grit paper on the random orbital sander, it was slow going.  Here’s the result.

There is still a lot of detail sanding to go, but before getting too carried away, I wanted to make sure that the neck plane was sufficient to clear the pickups while still keeping the action nice and low.  I don’t have any shots of this step, but I started by placing the fretboard in place, propping it up on the end so it matched the angle of the neck plane.  Next I placed the bridge (shimmed slightly to simulate its installed height) and pickup rings approximately where they will be installed.  I then placed a straight edge on the fretboard so it ran back and over the bridge.  What I discovered was that the bridge would have to be almost on the top deck of the guitar to get the right action.  So I went back and added a little more angle to the neck plane (going from 4.2 to 4.4 degrees).  I also did some careful measurements on the deck thickness after the carve and discovered it was a little thick at the bridge/tail-piece area.  So I lowered this down a little bit also.  The changes resulted in the 15-15.5 mm of clearance that ExNihilo recommended in one of his threads.  Once the neck is built I’ll double-check everything to make sure all the clearances are correct.