I've got nothing terribly exciting going on with virtual machines right now. No itches to scratch.
What I do have is my old computer and it's gathering dust; along with some external USB hard drives.
I tried Linux From Scratch before. I compiled everything, booted but there were configuration weirdnesses.
I'm going to do something different this time.
This time I'm going to boot and work from the Mint 18 usb disk, use the external HD as a download and work area ($LFS) and have sda set as my target.
If this works, this should make things a LOT easier than trying to split up one hard drive between Mint and LFS.
I'll post my results if I get any!