Heathkit Cr 1
Kym Cavrak
Most hams and EEs of a certain age remember fondly their first Heathkit. Everybody had at least one Heathkit. For hams, their products made it possible to get on the air with a decent-performing radio at a fraction of the cost of ready-built radios from Drake, Swan, and the rest. Even when Kenwood, Icom, and Yaesu got into the market, there was still space for Heathkits, but they seemed to get distracted with other things, went through a series of acquisitions by conglomerates, and eventually faded away.
I expect a Heathkit to cost more than the finished product. All individual components need packing and labelling, instructions need to be proven, and quality control on the finished product will be absent. I assembled several Heathkit products in the 1960s
I have been designing and selling kits for the past 30 years. Kit sales have dropped off to less than 10%.
Heathkit tried to come back but the sales were minuscule. It was originally successful because the products were new and revolutionary and not avai
I doubt that Heathkits or lack thereof has much to do with turning hatchlings into engineers. Folks are born straight, gay, artists or maybe engineers. You can cultivate an interest but the core must be in your DNA.
I worked at a Heathkit Store in the early 80's (Houston) and built many of their kits for my own use and for display in the store. Remarkable engineering and quality. I still have a few of the units that I still use today. An Automobile battery charger, a
I had to have built everything in the Heathkit catalogs from the basic ohmmeters, to the ham equipment to the tv and the Thomas Organ. Missed out on the HERO robot. I still have some of the hardware working and others I have donated to a radio museum in
In the 60's, I put together an AR15. The instructions were excellent, but for right handers. Being left handed, I found that it was better to start at the bottom of the page and work up. Maybe 10 years earlier, my father had built a Hi Fi Mono amplifier
Like most of us EEs, I built several kits over the years. One in particular taught me the fragility of the Heathkit business model. It was their rack-mount single-channel lab power supply with the big HV plasma volts/amps display. On completion, it did not
A legal limit 6M amp would be interesting, but I never hear anybody on 6M these days (Portland, OR). It is a waste not to have a generation interested in such things. As a kid I built my first super regenerative receiver at age 12 (vacuum tubes) and over
I wouldn't be so sardonic about the celebrity-following, although that nonsense certainly is a distraction.
The modern-day heathkit is linux & the web.
In other words, hardware has lost out to software.
Unfortunately, software without hardware is just th
I 2nd that about Ramsey. They do have some interesting kits, but not up to Heathkit standards. I have built several and most have worked fine. I still have a video transmitter that I have never been able to get to work, but the problem is probably somethin
What has happened with that Heatkit name and rights is that a person, who would be similar to a patent troll, has purchased a chunk of what used to be public domain, and has now set high prices on using it. He did nothing toward creating any of the intelle
My Brother built a Heathkit TV, it worked great as long as it was relatively cool, it did not like our none-air conditioned living room in summer.
My Father early on built one of the original Heath Kits, a 1927 Heath Parasol. he flew it a couple of times b
Don Peterson purchased the entire collection of old manuals from Heathkit Educational Systems, for about $4k, and was granted rights to make and sell copies. That's all he owns, is a massive collection of original manuals and rights to make copies. That's
There is a Yahoo Group for Heathkits, and members often have the manuals and instructions available. The aformentioned individual lurks there and always is quick to offer the needed manual for sale. Usually another member will loan the needed manual or som
I was a kit builder in the 1960s but I had Allied and Eico kits. I fixed a few Heathkit stereo amps including some early solid state receivers. They didn't sound very good even by 1960 standards. You could hear crossover distortion at low volume levels. Bu
I built a gas detector, fog horn and some other kinds of equipment, which I do not remember. The important thing, it taught me how to solder, and build my reading skills. I have grandchildren now, and I would like to get them into projects that they can
I'm not an engineer, but I certainly grew up in a family of them. My dad is a metalurgical engineer and works in failure analysis for Atmel. My grandfather on my mom's side is also an engineer and worked for HP for many years. Going way back, my great-grandfather was a blacksmith on the Midland Railroad (maybe not a formal engineer, but some of the stuff he built certainly took some engineering acumen). So it might come as no surprise that one day, while rummaging through my grandpa's basement, I came across a dusty box with what appeared to be a stereo in it. On top of the stereo was a manual with the words "Heathkit" across the front. Turns out, it was my dad's old Heathkit Preamplifier.
My dad took me aside and explained how he built it. How he had saved his money for the kit, ordered it, and then put it together. We looked over the "Theory of Operation" section and he explained to me what some of it meant. He used it to teach me about resistor color codes and what a diode does. For a 15-year old kid, it was actually pretty cool. I loved the idea of a company like Heathkit, but by that time they were pretty much out of the electronic kit business. So when this article titled "The Rise and Fall of Heathkit -- And Rise of SparkFun" by Electronic Design's Communication Editor Lou Frenzel came out, it definitely brought back some memories.
It is quite an honor to be compared so favorably to Heathkit, a company that, for many of us here at SparkFun, introduced us to electronics. Certainly, in a way, Heathkit is SparkFun's predecessor and one of the founders of the entire DIY movement. Pretty cool stuff. Give the article a read. What was your favorite Heathkit? Tell us about it in the comments.
Another tangentially related comment. One of my old bosses related how he became interested in electronics. He asked his dad:"Can I have my own TV in my room?" Answer: "No. Are you nuts?"A couple of weeks later his dad brought home a TV and said: "This is yours. The only catch is, it doesn't work. But I'll drive you to the library where you can check out books on TV repair, and I'll pay for the parts."
I had that lego based electronics kit from Heathkit too, I was 8yrs old in 1970. My older brother bought as a bday gift, he was still away serving in the military, so I had to build it myself cause my parents didn't anything about electronics. Looking back I think that was the best approach to get young kids into electronics. I wish I kept it, my parents retired and cleaned out the house while I was gone. I still can't find it in old catalog, but I only have a couple of copies.
update: found a later version, that was smaller, less features, but the same general layout. This had only one console, the early version had 2 consoles - with more instruments - and a larger breadboard area
To be the heir to Heathkit, you need to make kits that are useful for everyday stuff and put them in nice enclosures.Kits like clocks, weather stations, stereos, and TVs (all of which Heathkit made) in living-room-friendly enclosures had obvious appeal to non-engineers and gently invited them into the hobby. A kid looking at a Heathkit could think "Wow, I can make something that works and looks as good as something I can buy at Sears." Contrast that with a Sparkfun ClockIt. A kid looking at a Sparkfun ClockIt would say "That's an ugly, geeky looking thing." It sure doesn't look like a clock!
Even if you convinced him to buy it and assemble it, what's he going to do with it? Use it as his regular alarm clock? The buttons are awkward and if it's sitting on his nightstand, it'll flop around at the end of its power cord, fall off the table, or get destroyed.
Can Heathkit-quality kits be developed and sold for a reasonable price these days? I don't know. Ramsey has a couple of kits that might qualify (they have a nixie clock with a nice enclosure, but it ain't cheap). But in my book, that's what it'll take to be on par with Heathkit.
I challenge you to check that with current youth. This year my daughter has asked for the Big Time Watch kit (original form, not the dots) and I'm quite certain that it's for use. And glittery stickers.The Heathkit advantage was originally price: didn't pay for assembly labor, the learning was a happy accident and the finish you find appealing was critical. Somewhere in the middle, there was an era where it was all about learning, finish was whatever but manuals mattered most. Now, it's all about stock functions in a custom package or custom combination of functions: flexibility is the reason for a home build. Instead of a kit version, we have a mod-n-hack version of consumer products now that "looks like something I could buy at Sears" means "rebranded white goods" In the competition between "made in " versus home made, kits can be THE way to have something with non-negative style.
Thus things in common between Sparkfun and Heathkit are eminently hackable results, full schematics and bills of materials, and good build instructions. But Sparkfun kits are better for today than "Heathkit style" kits (except for Hams, when will Sparkfun carry a 144.390 MHz module for GPRS?). The Sparkfun manuals keep getting better, and may become Heath-quality soon enough. But there is no Heathkit finish: that was fashion for a time past. Instead Sparkfun stays on the inside of the final box. And that's today's nice finish.
For what it's worth, I started my soldering with the Heathkit code practice oscillator in the "all about learning" era. Gathered a fair bit of dust for years after that - learning was "finished". In the last year or two, the components of that (keyer, sounder) have been used with both Arduino and Chumby hardware - both have been programmed to adaptively read Morse, so I could have "by hand" one-wire input. And the code practice function it was originally built for? Instead, my kids have a hacked together "make your own key" (just like light sabers) version built for two "operators" - code fight! Easy, common sub-circuits, but a combination not in stores.
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