triman, I have been handlaying track for years, it takes much longer to handlay than it does to slap a piece of flex track down. If you have a large layout you will have to concider time as a factor in laying track, how long do you want to spend on this part of the hobby?? With the way and appearance of flex track is these days you realy have to concider if it is worth it to handlay the track. There have been several posts on how to weather flex track it is amazing how close to the real thing you can make it appear. I did make my switches years ago, of course only code 100 was available at that time, and had difficulty with the throw rails. On short ones they were too stiff and if you cut them and put in something to make them flow freely, in a short period of time they would become too loose, thus went to comercial , peco, switches. I put down mostly code 100 flex track on my small layout, only reason was that I had lots of it, and am slowly replacing it with hand laid code 83. One advantage of building your own switches is that you can get the degree of angle that you require and not have to go with what is make commercially. I have built a few switches on scrap board using code 83 for practice and they work fine so am going to replace my commercial ones as I go. Again you have to concider the time factor.
You want a place to start, it is right infront of you, it is called a workbench and practice. Take a scrap piece of your sub board be it homosoate or whatever, put down some ties, mark where your rails go then put the rails down. To practice making switches , photocopy a switch then glue the paper down and try re create the switch. Remember you will throw away or start over several of your first attempts, so go slow. You require a couple of good track guages, a NMRA guage, ties spikes, rail and the most important thing is PATIENCE !!!
Good luck and enjoy., let us know how it is going. Ron..