Another vote for the Z80 if you want to know about busses at what not.
Although it wasn't the first hand wired computer I built, my first Z80 was hand wired on stripboard in the 70s, and I got it working without a scope, just an LED plus resistor as a logic probe and a crap 1k ohm per volt multimeter were all I had as test equipment. Occasionally I might use a monostable and LED to show if something was oscillating or not if the pulse was so narrow it couldn't be discerned visually on an LED from always on or always off, but usually an LED plus resistor was all you needed.
True, I wouldn't want to do it that way nowadays, but TE was in relative terms really very expensive. Occasionally I'd have access to a scope, but it was rare. I remember the first scope I used with a delayed timebase, that really was something when trying to dubug your code at bus level, which is what we did back in those days without debuggers, logic analysers or in circuit emulators. When initially getting a machine up for the first time, we used to set a trigger reference point, and go through each of the control, data and address bus bits one at a time and mark down the binary on paper. You could then see the machine code and where things weren't happening as expected.