One must become one with the lead alloy. Allow one's thoughts to grow heavy, yet hard edged...
And have a butt-load of time to screw around with it.
/johnny
Apparently I achieved the requisite zen with a piece of galena when I had a cat whisker radio kit as a kid. It only brought in one station, however. The slider on the coil was useless. Later radios built with a packaged germanium diode performed better and even tuned in multiple stations. I was never able to get the “safety pin point on a tarnished penny” detector system to work, though it would have looked cool as heck if it did.
Oh... and I believe galena isn’t an alloy, it’s a compound. Lead sulfide. (II) to be technical about it (there are sulfides with various valences). It itself looks leaden grey, so it’s easy to confuse with an alloy.