Preparing The Neck Join

Wow, three posts in one day - I didn't actually do all this stuff today, I just got around to posting about it.

In this photo you can see the notch I cut in the guitar top for the mortise, and you can see the pencil line around that which indicates where the fingerboard overhang will extend to. There is a little extra wood still on the top at the outer edge of the neck join area (where the cutaway is). That will be gone when it's trimmed to fit the side walls after they're done.

Anyway, the long tenon on the heel of the neck will need to fit into a long mortise in the neck block, which means I need to access the mortise via the top of the guitar (not all mortise and tenon joins are done this way on guitars, but archtops often are - many acoustics are built with a very shallow mortise and tenon, only accessed from the wall behind the neck join).
The neck will sit at a 3.5 degree angle from the body of the guitar. It will also have to be set slightly down into the top so that only a portion of the overhang and fingerboard will be higher than the guitar top at the 14th fret (the 14th fret is where the neck will meet the body). The reason for this position is to allow for proper string clearance with a 1" bridge. My plan is to make the neck block square-cornered, but carve down the guitar top area that will sit under the finger board overhang (the area within the pencil lines), at an angle, until the desired depth and neck angle are achieved.