Ok, I'll take the advice on stains, thank you. I'll practice on a bit of oak I've got and see how that turns out.

After the first week of pretty much letting the wood settle down (and having to work) I've had the chance to spend some time on it. Followed the guide for setting the scale length, bridge and drilled the holes for the bridge and lined up the pickups and drilled the holes for the neck.

Then decided to keep going with the instruction manual and cut the headstock. Didn't really have any great ideas for the shape, other than I wanted to keep it fairly traditional. I've got an old Mexican Fender Jazz neck with a broken truss rod (if anyone has any ideas how to replace that - can't decided whether to take the fretboard off the top or take the fillet out of the underneath to get access), so I used the shape of the headstock - more or less. (Sorry about the distracting tablecloth!)



Transferred it onto the neck....



Set it up for cutting it out with my jigsaw. Annoyingly I didn't have any of the narrower blades for cutting tighter curves, so I had to do it in various passes. However managed to get more or less close to what I wanted.



... Some tidying up with a surform, a file and some sanding...



Fairly pleased with the result at the end.