By the time you purchase all of the tools that you need, and all of the supplies to practice your skills with before you even start, you'd be many many dollars ahead to just find a good quality trim carpenter and have them do the work. It won't be as personally satisfying, but if you're doing this to save money, you won't.

You are very wise...

But we've purchased lots of tools for various projects over 30 years...so we shouldn't have to pick up too much more.

With that in mind, any suggestions?

I was planning on building my own custom hood but my plan sounds a little different than yours. When I get the plans drawn up I'll post them. I'm kind of like you though, I didn't want to pay a lot of money to have someone else do this and I couldn't find a hood the size, shape, color I wanted without having it custom made. Though I have wished a couple times that I just went with a stock stainless steel hood. I'm commited now, I have the outside blower mounted and the hood insert bought. I have all the tools necessary to pull this off I just need to come up with a plan that will work. I have been planning to tile the inside of the hood and have a tile border at the bottom lip going up about six inches. The rest of the "shell" would be either wood, sheet rock with a plaster coat, more tile or a mix of these. I'll try and post my plan and the finished result when I'm done. I don't know when that would be but don't hold your breath. ;-)

There was a thread about this on the kitchen forum.

My DH is a professional remodeler with 25+ years experience, and he designed and built our island hood to accommodate a Sirius hood liner and antique copper shell. It took 1-2 days to design how to build it, 3-4 solid days of work for him to build the thing, and a good day's work for me to hunt down all of the parts. It was very complicated to engineer the whole thing and a LOT of work to assemble.

While our cash outlay for the whole thing was well under $1,000, if you pay him anything at all for his time, we might have been better off forking over $3-4,000 to have someone else do it.

My thoughts on the matter -- NO disrespect intended -- is that if you need someone's help to figure out what to do or how to do it, you may not have the DIY skills needed to do the job. It's not a project that I would consider DIY-able.

"plywood, with a stucco or venetian plaster finish"

Plywood is mnopt the best base for any type of plaster. Wood (even plywood) moves to much with seasonal humidity to be a very stable base.
A 1x wooden frame covered with 1/4 inch cement board would hold up better.
It is not rough carpentry, but it does not need the appearacne of finish work either since the frame wil be covered.
If you are pretty good at cabinet/furniture type construction it would be easy. If you are not it will seem like an absolute nightmare.

I have been playing around with google sketchup designing hoods and here are some examples of what I've come up with. I think all of these are doable by any experienced DIY'er as long as you are good with tileing and woodworking. Of course it is going to take some (ALOT) of time.

Here is a link that might be useful: hood interior

Gina, putting aside whether or not plywood's a suitable base, - stucco or plaster - are you kidding?

You need a material that's easy to clean. Plaster or stucco is most certainly not....

There's a reason why range hoods are metal, and it's ease of cleaning, and lower flammability. I don't know what you shelled out on this kit or how it works - does it include filters etc?

In the end, when you consider the cost benefits of mass-production, you will not build something cheaper, certainly when you take labour costs into account. If, however, you want the satisfaction of doing your own thing, the way you want it, and can't get what you want ready-made, then go for it. But DIY in this instance to save money? Probably not. If the end result doesn't look like a million bucks, it'll be more of a liability.

My old house was owned by a cheapskate who was a very poor handyman. The 'range hood' was a plywood box, vertical, over the stove and between the cupboards....from that point of view, it was ok but not pretty to look at inside. For a fan, he used an exhaust fan out through the wall, with no filter. It was kind of disgusting, the way the grease had built up on it. No light in there either - if you're planning lighting which is a MUST for any range hood, that's another thing to consider.

Apart from ease of cleaning, filters and other factors, and, as you mentioned, the greater efficiency of placing the hood lower down towards the stove, putting combustible wood above a stove is always going to be an iffy thing. True, kitchen cabinets are wood-based, but the (usually laminate) coverings on them make them much more difficult to set alight.

If you had a little experience in woodworking (and Home depot and others offer weekend classes in such things) the notion of building such a box isn't really that difficult. If you use a thick high-quality plywood or MDF you don't need any framing, it can be glued and screwed together. As for shapes, templates etc, you can get a basic shape by looking at a steel hood - but oh yeah, most will be the nice, unobtrusive slim, pull-out type, and what you want is basically an old-fashioned kind of thing, deeper and probably taller too.

The real trick is to make full-sized cardboard or paper template cut-outs. Then (ideally with cardboard) you can tape it together and see how it will all come together.

You could also consider making your own sheet metal one, say out of stainless or aluminum, but a lot of tool expertise is required, and special tools also....

"There's a reason why range hoods are metal, and it's ease of cleaning, and lower flammability."

Decorative hoods like te one being discussd have a metal liner for fire protection.
the trim that covers the metal is a personnal decision.
If the vent works well there should be minimal grease floating around.
I still prefer sheet metal for the dust that inevitably gets on the hood.

Ok, I've not seen this lining type of thing - that would work I guess, but I still wouldn't want anything plaster/stucco-like that close unless it was really well sealed, glossy and easy to clean.

Check out a company called Custom Wood Hoods, they have really low prices on these. I have a plaster one from them with a really rough finish and it is not hard to clean. i guess if i did A LOT of greasy cooking it would be a little more difficult, but the whole idea of the hood is to filter the grease up and through the exhaust (i.e. meaning it's not going to get all over the hood itself!) After three years of use, not a single problem with grease inside or out.

The way I see it, you start out looking good with the patina, and as it wears you work down to bare copper, and it looks good the whole way. If you start bare, you fight with the fingerprints forever almost until the color eventually stabilizes. Looks real bad unless you really stay on it and put in that polishing time. And for sure, don't lacquer it if you're going to leave it bare. Very bad idea - it'll chip and tarnish where it chips and you'll have a very difficult-to-fix mess.

Here is a link that might be useful: Range Hoods