[Milsurplus] Let's appreciate crystals

[Hubert Miller]

>On Behalf Of Dave Merrill
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2025 6:38 PM
Cc: Military Surplus net List
Subject: Re: [Milsurplus] Let's appreciate crystals

One of the many companies was the Good-All Mfg. Co. of Ogallala, Nebraska.

Some years ago my wife and I were passing through Nebraska and stopped in Ogallala for lunch. We discovered there was a local history museum in an old Victorian house once occupied by the town doctor, so of course we paid a visit.

Upstairs, tucked away in a small room, was a display case with items that had been made by local companies. My eye caught a familiar object: an FT-243 crystal unit marked 'Good-All.'

They had been a small-time maker of paper capacitors and became one of the hundreds of crystal manufacturers once WWII loomed.  IIRC, a card in the case made the dubious claim that Good-All had discovered the method of finishing crystal blanks to their desired frequency by etching with acid. It's more likely that the QCS shared the technology with all the companies making crystals for the war effort.

I've managed to find a few FT-243 crystals for the BC-1335 that bear their name.

>--... ...-- Dave N9ZC

I don’t recall if i already have commented on the above email. Anyway, cleaning up old emails, i found it again and the topic is still interesting to me and
brings back some memories. I was in Junioor High School and wanted to build the one-transistor regen published in Popular Science magazine, the
article “A Hookah Powered Radio”. No, i did not build the thermoelectric cell to power it. I ordered the parts from Allied Radio, Chicago; it must have
been one of their larger orders, no doubt: a couple capacitors, a resistor, a ferrite slug coilform, and hundreds of feet of #36 and #38 wire. The condenser
was a tubular wax thing labeled “Good-All”. If i had a mentor at the time, the mentor would have said, you don’t need to buy hundreds of feet of wire for
a coil; you can use what you scrounge up, forget the #36 and #38 spec for maybe 12 feet of wire you need. The rest of the parts you can take out of some
junked radio at zero cost. Anyway i put a lot of work into the case for it, and then….it did not work. Maybe a mentor would have said, “Look, wire the
transistor this way instead”, but there was no one to tell me that, so scratch one project.
-Hue Miller
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