After talking with some other luthiers, I decided NOT to drop the truss rod in from the back, but to slice off a piece of the neck and continue construction with it being a separate fretboard. There are a couple of pretty good reasons for this:
1) Construction will be easier.
2) The glue line on the purpleheart sides will be virtually invisible.
3) Dropping it in from the back would leave a channel in the flamed maple that would have to be filled, probably with PH or maple. A maple filler, even if flamed and taken from the same board, would leave very visible glue lines. Neither PH or FM were acceptable visually to me.
4) Glue joints are typically stronger than the surrounding wood, so a pinstriped fretboard will (probably) be stronger than a solid one. This means the truss rod won't pop through the front.
The bottom line reason for doing this is to keep the pinstriped fretboard/neck visual. Everything was really mental wrestling with how to put in the truss rod while keeping the appearance of a "one-piece" neck. We'll see how it works out pretty soon.
The first pic here is the scarf joint being glued. The second is the neck blank our of the clamps with the fretboard & truss rod sitting on top.
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