All right, so no pics to accompany the work, but:
-Finished cleaning up the neck taper. Somewhere along the way it had aquired a few minor flaws, but nothing that 2 minutes with a sanding block didn't clear up
-Thinned out the headstock. Ideally, this should be done before doing the scarf joint, I would think. But, first-timer that I am, I blew the mission. The solution:
1. figured out how thin I needed it, including ebony faceplate, to accomodate the tuners. Marked the depth on both sides with a pencil.
2. Used a plunge router, set to the correct depth, to hog away as much wood as possible from the back of the headstock before the lack of a surface meant that using the router wasn't possible anymore
3. Tried a few power tools before settling on a good old manual tool-- in this case, my microplane rasp-- to get rid of the remaining wood with brute force and elbow grease. The previously drawn lines, along with the already-flat surface served as guides for when to stop rasping.
4. Cleaned the whole thing up with an orbital sander and some 100-grit sandpaper. A coarser grit would've been more effective initially, but in the time that it would have taken to change papers, I just worked the sander instead.
I left a little bit of wood for a volute of some sort, but due to space constraints on my compact-ish headstock, there's not going to be much of one. If it ends up being TOO dinky as far as volutes go, I might just get rid of it altogether. At least by leaving some wood, though, I have the option.
Next steps: gluing the faceplate and fretboard. However, it's been advised that I inlay these first, so that means the real next step is inlaying the faceplate and fretboard, something I've never done before.
Before I can get to that, I need to research some inlaying techniques, and I would like to construct a makeshift router base for my SpinSaw's flex-shaft. I like the one in the tutorial section of the main site, but I have some plans in my head on how I want to modify it. So, that should take up the next week of free time, if I'm lucky. When you have a dog, work, friends, and a girlfriend, it's pretty slow-going.
I also found flap-discs for the angle grinder, though I didn't purchase one yet. Turns out that Canadian Tire stocks a pretty good selection of them. Wal-Mart had a very limited tool area. American Wal-Marts are clearly more all-encompassing than ours. I'll pick one up and when I'm sick of working on inlay, I'll practice on some scrap wood to see if it's a technique that I could make use of for carving the top.
Greg