most people remaster or respin a distro to adapt it to their own. slax, fedora, debian, slackware, ubuntu, are very popular for this.
to build your own you can go to kernel.org and get a copy of the kernel, but i would have no idea how to get past that.
you may want to check out http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ and start there. I have never done this, but would be interested in doing this one day with the group.
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