Yes people have tried it. It works to a point. Vacuum or pressure to eliminate voids and bubbles is a requirement and not 100% successful. Even Shadetree Custom Composites stuff has voids in it. Most people who do this satisfy their curiosity and move on to buying their composites.
We should establish a measuring index for evaluating the possibilities of some tasks we undertake. Call it "Halfass to Professional Rating" or HPR. A 1 to 10 scale, 1 being no matter what, in comparison to professional products or services either because of the investment or unavailability of materials, the measured task will be halfass. 10 being you can do it yourself just as well as any professional service/product.
So for example, I'm going to give Heat Treating a 9 HPR. All of the proper equipment is available to us. Reams of data is available from trial and error, testing, even actual metalurgists posting about cutlery specific heat treatment protocols. There's literally nothing, outside some proprietary schedules, that Peters or Bos or whomever does that a custom knifemaker can't do himself - the difference is simply scale of capabilities. The only reason it's not a 10 is because of the vast amount of ways people can and do screw it up.
Stabilizing wood. Let's call that a 6. You can do it at home. You can do it to a high degree of satisfaction depending on the wood type. You cannot match what K&G can do. So, serviceable.
Smelting your own steel. How about a 2. You can do it. People are making wootz and tamamamamagahne or whatever. It's a huge investment in time and labor. No one I've seen who actually does this, seems to do anything but this I'm guessing because of the time, and no matter how good they get, it'll never make a knife that will outperform commonly available relatively inexpensive commercial steel. So can you? Yes. Should you? All depends on your personal goals. A low rating on HPR doesn't mean you didn't make the bestest most awesome batch of bloom ever to grace the earth - just that in that best case example it's maybe the equivalent in performance to 80CRV2?
With that, in my opinion home made epoxy or polyster resin laminates are a 5. Lots of ways to screw it up. Never going to match true phenolic durability or stability. Not much data available other than anecdotal accounts of how others have done it. But may be the only way to get exactly what you want because it's not being offered commercially. But it is doable.
