Making your own solar panels is something that sounds tough but really is pretty trivial, assuming that you have some good directions and a little patience.

You will need a few items:

• Solar Cells.  These are available off of eBay for less than one dollar a piece.  Your DIY Solar Panels will likely need more than a few of these so it's best to figure out what you want to power first.
• Solar Panels.  These are the meat and potatoes of your project.  A solar panel is nothing more than a bunch of solar cells thrown together.  If you know how to build a simple table, this will be cake for you.

The solar cells are the guys that will be doing all of the work for you.  They will actually be doing the job of converting the light from our sun to energy which you can use.  Pretty awesome for something that you can buy off of ebay for less than the cost of a donut!

Photovoltaics is the field of study which contains the science behind solar cells.  Definitely google or bing this, it's some pretty intertesting reading.  You'll want to learn about this, it's one of the reasons you're building your own solar panel in the first place!

So now that you have all of these items what do you do?  Simple, read.  This is the type of thing that any upfront study that you do will be paid back twofold when you go ahead and do your solar project.  I was cocky and tried to jump in when I frist received the material but this was a huge mistake.  I took a step back, read some stuff, mapped out what I wanted to do, took my time, and got a result that I could be proud of my first time.  I made my own solar panel!