This is the 12-way, 3 Amp terminal strip used to secure the components in the kit without soldering. Electronics engineers like to call these, "choccy blocks." The insulating material is polyethylene which has very good insulating properties. You might have seen the Ladybird radio book which famously uses brass screw-cups screwed down into wood to hold the components. It works, and wood is a fairly good insulator, but it retains some small amount of water. You don't really want anything reducing the insulation across the main tuning coil of a crystal set or other radio circuit, especially at radio frequencies. A high D.C. resistance measured with a multi-meter may not reveal the whole truth.
Some of the connection points are unused in the purist crystal set kit. All the connection points are used in the single transistor radio version.
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