That's physically almost impossible. Even if the crystal sheet were to drop off the mounts it would have to do something electrically hard to explain to cause a short. The contact areas are usually the only conducting parts on the crystal itself. Failing open is easy for the exact same reason: if the crystal is mechanically damaged that will usually dislodge one or both of the contact areas. This is because those are the only places where something touches the crystal to give it as much freedom to vibrate as possible, any kind of further constraint would impede function.

Nope.

> Every time I ask a contract manufacturer to assemble a batch of more Floppy Emus, there are always a few that don’t pass QA testing.

It seems like this would still be 60 out of a number less than the total production over all time. I was just curious what the failure rate was. We recently had a build with one failure out of 500. Which I'm happy with but isn't that large a sample size.