My excursion into nostalgia has me researching homebrew transistors and tubes. Today, G3CWI mentioned this article about homebrewing transistors on the GQRP list. The method isn’t quite as “from scratch” as I would like: it basically uses the innards of a diode to make a point-contact transistor. Something that comes a bit closer to real from scratch construction are these zinc oxide negative resistance oscillators and amplifiers. Okay, okay, I can’t make galvanized sheet metal any more than I can transistors or diodes, but it feels closer to bare metal because it uses, well, bare metal!