  A formalism for studying heavy quarks in terms of model Dyson-Schwinger
equations is developed. The formalism is the natural extension of a technique
which has proved successful in a number of studies of light hadron physics. The
dressed heavy quark propagator, calculated to leading order in the inverse
quark mass, is incorporated in a treatment of mesons consisting of a heavy
quark and light antiquark via the ladder approximation Bethe-Salpeter equation.
In the limit of infinite heavy quark mass the model is found to respect the
spectrum degeneracies present in Heavy Quark Effective Theory. An exploratory
numerical analysis of a simple form of the model is carried out to assess its
viability for studying $D$ and $B$ mesons.
