I thought Linux from Scratch was a pretty cool tutorial, but I felt having to wait for everything to compile was a bit nerve-wreaking.
Is there a tutorial similar to LFS except pre-compiled binaries are used whenever possible? I would imagine that if you were running a specific liveCD (e.g. Ubuntu) you could just copy over a lot of the pieces of the liveCD for the system you're building (e.g. kernel, libraries, executables, etc.).