If you're not an experienced fabricator and a good welder (with a 220/240v welder), I would pass on trying to make the drop brackets. You don't have to buy an entire suspension lift kit from a company, but you can buy drop brackets by themselves for the front axle pivots.
To clear 36" tires you will need a lot of lift. I would say more than a 6" suspension lift unless you want to cut most of your fenders off. You'll probably still need to trim the fenders even with 6 or 7" of lift.
I'm in the process of putting 35's on my choptop with a sort of home-fab lift. I bought axle pivot drop brackets and lift springs awhile back to fab up a lift. Now I'm swapping to a heavier front axle and re-doing some stuff. I got the axle pivot drops I needed, got some 3" lift coils, used an F-150 spring perch and some extended radius arms to get me ~5" of lift out front. I also had to use a drop pitman arm(bought) and extended brake lines. For the back I did explorer leaf packs with an extra leaf and chevy drop shackles to get it sitting roughly level. Then I added a 2" body lift when I did my body mounts, for a total of roughly 7" of lift as cheaply as possible. It still cost me, IIRC I spent $130 getting the drop brackets and coils (used), $50 on the extended brake lines, $55 on the F-150 spring perches, $50 on the drop shackles, $75 on the leafs (I broke apart two sets of packs and built my custom packs), $40 on the extended arms (a guy did me a favor), $100 on shocks, and around $220 on the body lift and body mount bushings.
Now I'm adding another $300 or so to make new extended arms, trans x-member, and a braced front TTB axle.
All of my information on doing the lift? Yea, I searched around on here, the information can be found (a lot of it is in the tech archives).