I made my own switches and a crossover with fast track jigs, but used flextrack for the rest. If you need to make 10-12 switches, then the upfront investment in the tooling is worth it for the per switch savings on the back end. I doubt the crossover plate was worth what I paid for it, but I did it anyways. The crossover was a challenge to build. When I was in assembly mode, I got down to about a switch in 2 hours or so. It wasnt too bad, but I do agree about the 1" belt sander. I got one to knock down the bulk of the rail and then filed the rest by hand in the Fasttracks fixtures. It was also nice because I could use full sticks of MicroEngineering flex track to build the switch and give my self seamless transitions out of the switch rather than have a track joint and the inevitable straight end of a piece of flex track close to the frog.
I dont think I would have the patience to lay it all by hand. There's just too many things to do with a layout, somewhere along the way decisions have to be made about what you're going to devote the time to. I'd rather build buildings and trains than build track.
