Pickup plane carve

I routed the pickup plane into the body. This is a plane at the same angle as the neck angle, between the neck pocket and the first pickup route. In my case, the neck angle will be four degrees. 

First step is to prepare the router box to route at an angle.

I attached a pair of four degree wedges that I made onto the base of the router box, making sure they were parallel to the centre line, and positioned at the same point longitudinally in the box:

To this, I attached the guitar body. It's obviously important to make sure that the body is parallel to the wedges, which is done by lining the centre line up with the centre line of the router box at the back:

And at the front:

I then marked the wood to be removed, up to a line which marks the location of the neck pickup:

Then I make small passes with the router, removing a fraction at a time. It is key at this point to go slowly, as any tears or chip outs on the top will be visible and cannot be repaired invisibly. After a couple of router passes, we creep up on the line:

And a bit closer...

... closer...

Until we're done. We've now finished carving the pickup plane at the required angle. There is one more plane to carve, between the top of the the pickup plane and the bridge. However, I'm not sure how to work out the angle of this one so I'm putting it off for now.

This carve removed another 40 grams or so :]