In those days I'd buy Heathkit equipment and solder it together :-)
I did that with my H-11 (a PDP-11). It worked perfectly first time, and served me well. It was the only computer of mine I got rid of, and the only one worth any money today.
I had some experience building Heathkits, and the instructions were excellent, so I had no trouble at all with it. I later added a 6Mb hard disk drive to it, building my own I/O card and writing the boot loader for it.
6Mb was oceans of space in those days :-) Now I have an 8Tb drive.
I did that with my H-11 (a PDP-11). It worked perfectly first time, and served me well. It was the only computer of mine I got rid of, and the only one worth any money today.