... there's pretty much no chance of you seriously hurting yourself anyway ...
While the odds of serious injury are
relatively small, there is a reasonable and distinct possibility of serious (up to and including lethal) harm when working with such circuits. Working with high voltage circuits deserve caution and most importantly a lot of reading before hand. If someone doesn't understand how the circuit in question works, they are much more likely to hurt themselves.
I'm all for building stuff from scratch,
if your primary goal is learning about how such things work; however, if the primary goal is to use the device it only makes financial sense if you have a fair bit of experience both in constructing circuits as well as in understanding how they work. If you don't you will almost certainly spend more money (not even counting the time involved) getting a working device that even then will not perform as well as what you could have purchased...