Or about half of what an atomic clock is at the discounters
and there the price includes a huge
display along with the receiver parts.

Oh, I'm all for cannibalizing the commercial clocks, what with their
pretuned ferrite loops, 60kHz receiver and demodulator, as a
cost-and-time-effective method. But if someone did want to roll their
own...

I have custom ordered tuning-fork style crystals down to 12kHz, and
they were way more than the mass-produced $1 jobbies! I think $30-$50
each in onesies. $1 is really cheap in comparison.

Tim.