My father was telling me recently about how he built capacitors from scratch
when he was a boy. He scrounged broken bits of glass and alternated them
with pieces of tinfoil from gum wrappers. Together with some wire leads they
formed a capacitor for use in homebrew crystal radios. He used the large
oatmeal boxes for coil forms, and transducers from old telphone handsets for
the earpiece. A galena crystal and safety pin was used for the detector, but
I don't know where he came upon the galena.

Guy Atkins
Puyallup, WA USA


"Ron Hardin" wrote in message
...
We used to build them with 1N34A diode, capacitor across the headphones,
and a coil wound on a toilet paper tube, with taps on the coil
that you'd clip an allegator clip to, for tuning.

Assemble atop wooden board.

There were some with an actual cat whisker instead of the diode,
but we went the modern way mostly.
SNIP