Salmon said:
I thought Brazil was the major source of natural quartz. Get a piece, cut it
with a string saw. Then grind and polish to frequency.
They likely did that in the thirties, but I see no trace that hobbyists
ever really made their own crystals to any even mild extent.
After WWII, it was common to grind crystals a tad, because there were all
kinds of war surplus crystals that were really cheap, and were either not
quite at the needed frequency, or weren't particularly useful because people
were already using the frequency with the unground crystal. But that was the
era of FT-243 crystal holders, that you could easily unscrew to get the
blank out. More recent holders are far less conducive to that sort of thing.
But there is a big difference between raising the frequency of a properly
ground crystal a tad and starting from scratch. One fo the limits to
grinding is that you need a nice well-balanced quartz, and getting a suitably
thin and even blank in the first place is likely problematic for most.
Then they'd have to deal with making some sort of holder for the blanks.
Michael
