Carving the Heel

This part turned out to be not as bad as I had expected.  I started with the heel block which I built up earlier from several blocks of mahogany.

I marked the top where the heel cap will end up and I marked the sides so that I could take a rough cut out of the block.  You can see I marked the sides in the wrong place first and then I corrected it.  I used a coping saw and here's what the block looked like after the rough cut.

Next, I made a few intermediate cuts with the coping saw the take out small pieces of the wood. 

Once I had a good start by doing that, I used my drum sander bit on the drill press to smooth out the curves.  I'll finalize the heel later, but it is pretty close to what it will look like.

Shaping the Head

After the veneer was complete on the head, I used a scroll saw to cut the outline of the head that I had traced on.  The book suggested to cut down to roughly where the first fret would be so that is what I did.  I tried to be careful and not cut too close to my lines.  Once the rough shape was cut, I used a drum sander in my drill press to smooth the sides.

I bought some Grover tuners to use and drilled the 25/64" holes for those as needed.  The final head looks like this:

Neck Construction Part VI

I chose to add a veneer to the head of the neck.  Many guitars have this feature and I chose to use walnut to match the back and sides of the guitar.  I cut the veneer myself with a table saw to a thickness of about 1/16".  I used thin pieces of wood on each side between the clamps and the head/veneer.  Here's what it looked like when I glued it in place:

Then when I removed the clamps:

It will be trimmed to shape shortly.