As so many others who've tried this have discovered, the mechanics of making a pizza from scratch are not that much of
a challenge. The difficult part is in making soft, flaky crust, something that still eludes me with attempt #2.
There are only a handful of ingredients in pizza dough, a bit of olive oil, sugar, bread flour, yeast, salt and water. The yeast is typically the same kind of flora that gives us beer, Saccharomyces cerevisiae (sounds a lot like "cerveza," the Spanish word for beer, no?). The dutch used to make enough beer and yeast to be a major exporter of both. Anyway bakers used to get yeast from beer makers. Modern yeast is a bit more of an industrial process, but beer makers can still sell their yeast to bread makers.
Anyway the deal with dough is that, as Alton points out, for the right consistency you need a bubble-gum effect to happen with the wheat gluten (a complex carbohydrate) and the yeast, which outgases co2 as it chows down on the sugars and stuff in the flour. This is actually kind of tough to figure out, and there are some basic calculations bakers do to figure out the right amounts and timing for everything.
Fleischmann's is the modern brand of yeast you find in the supermarket, and recently they came out with a
"pizza" yeast. We found that since it has "no rise time" it come out fairly dense, but we may not be preparing or cooking it correctly. We're going to give it time to rise a bit in our fridge, which alton says is the best way to let pizza dough rise to give it lots of tiny bubbles.
Here's a gratuitous action shot of Karl chowing down on some of our homemade pizza crust:
Not pictured, Charlie chasing close behind in case of dropped food items.
Just joking. This is Erik's friend, Paul, who has an awesome bike! Though, if you're his mother and reading this...he doesn't have a motorcycle...at least not until Labor Day when you see it for the first time. 
We tried to talk him out of it, but no use.
There's an inside seam there, and I filled it with more construction adhesive after I dry fit my bottom piece of plywood in there. When you buy a 4x8 sheet of plywood, it's not actually 4 feet, it's usually 47.5 inches. That means the sides of my box are 16 inch ply, and the bottom is about 15.5 inch ply. Dry fitting everything let me ensure they were spaced correctly and squared up.
The plywood goes right down into the adhesive, and another block of 50 nails tack it in place.
The next step is to cut down a 4x8 sheet of OSB (6$) to 6ft x 16 inch pieces. The hardware store was nice enough to rip the sheet into three pieces, so I need to make them 6ft. A lot of people would bust out a table saw for this kind of thing, but I find that you get a straighter cut with a circular saw and a clamped fence. 
Here 'tis after the cut, note that the fence has to be the correct spacing from your cut line. 
This is a dry fit in the bed of my truck. By doing this I could measure for a center 2x4 exactly 9".
The trick is to remember that the "good" face of everything is face down.
