Heathkit is Back! Or, is it?

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mediatechnology
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Heathkit is Back! Or, is it?

Post by mediatechnology »

http://www.eetimes.com/discussion/break ... log-design

http://www.heathkit.com/

I noticed while remodeling the house that the Heath company had started selling wired and wireless doorbells. That Heath company, related to the old one in name only, has been around for a few years apparently.

Now, it looks like the Heathkit Educational Systems division will be selling general kits again. I welcome their return.
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JR.
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Re: Heathkit is Back!

Post by JR. »

I recall seeing a post about this somewhere... Apparently the new(?) Heathkit is still in benton harbor, or near there where the old one was in MI. I assumed some old Heathkit DNA.

There is a kit niche to mine, but not enough to support their old $100M level of activity in the good old days for kit businesses, so starting over decades later may be easier than scaling back.

I wish them good luck, again..

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Re: Heathkit is Back!

Post by mediatechnology »

From the original article:
By 1992 they had abandoned the kit business, and lived on as an educational company, trading on their expertise developed via the kit assembly manuals, which were widely praised for being brilliantly clear. Indeed, many folks with no electronics background built the kits, since the step-by-step instructions guided one with great clarity.
I had never made that connection into the educational market. But who didn't learn something from building a Heathkit?

My Dad built most of my later kits which were test equipment. He enjoyed building more than I did and I just wanted the relatively cheap, but useful gear. As a kid, they were one of the first to offer me credit. For a time, we had a Heathkit store in Dallas on Ross Avenue near Wholesale Electronics, Crabtree's Electronics and the monthly sidewalk sale. Ah, those were the days...OK, maybe not.

There are a lot of interesting Heathkit sites that I should post links to here.
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JR.
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Re: Heathkit is Back!

Post by JR. »

I recall them messing with educational programs and IIRC they bought or were somehow involved with a PC brand too on their way out of business... The economics of kit building for the mainstream consumer was terminally flawed. I sold lots of kits to college students who needed to build something for an electronics course.

I built an entire test bench mostly from heath kits for my company to save money, while my first kit exposure was a Lafayette radio short wave receiver as a young puke, and I also recall a friend building a Knight kit Hifi... I also built a 35W Eico(?) kit hifi later in the 60's. Ah the good old days when 35W was loud. :D I also recall only several years later when we could buy a fully assembled Japanese receiver for around the same as the earlier kits, if not less.

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Re: Heathkit is Back!

Post by mediatechnology »

Eico(?)
May have been Eico. I had an Eico SW regnerative receiver.

IIRC Knight Kit was Allied. I think Layfayette also had kits. Layfayette may have sold Eico.
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JR.
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Re: Heathkit is Back!

Post by JR. »

The Eico was a stereo receiver IIRC , i remember 35W, but that was in late 60s so my memory was so-so.. You know what they say about Boston in the 60's. If you remember it you weren't there. :lol:

The Lafayette SW radio kit was branded lafayette and sold by Lafayette , they were a major electronics hobby chain in the north east like an early radio shack. I don't recall where I bought the Eico, but this was years later than the SW radio. Perhaps mail order.

The knight kit was a friends so I don't recall much about where he got it, but i vaguely recall the design of the amp stage... looked like an old tube guy's first attempt to do solid sate. By dropping some PNPs where the tubes were. It even had interstage transformers driving the power devices. A little bizarre in hindsight.

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Re: Heathkit is Back!

Post by mediatechnology »

Not sure what year this article describing Heath/Zenith PC-based test equipment appeared. With competition being the likes of National Instruments I can see why they weren't that successful.

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Re: Heathkit is Back!

Post by mediatechnology »

There's a very detailed Heath Company company history at Hans Gatu's site: http://www.heathkit.nu/heathkit_nu_HeathStory.html
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Re: Heathkit is Back!

Post by Bill Wilson »

When I left as service manager of the Nashvile MCI dealer in early 78 to open my own studio equipment sales, service & design co.; most of my test equipment was Heaths laboratory series built from kits. The compliment consisted of 2 channel scope, 2 ac vtvm's, linear/log swept function generator, I.M analyser, & X/Y plotter to record the results from the Innovonics 1/3 octave RTA w room reverb measurement capability.

I recently replaced a couple of shorted tantalum caps in the swept function generator & it is good as new & the AC VTVM's still work perrfectly. I met Bruno 2000 at Bob Richardsons studio in early 78, on a service trip.

Like a lot of other older guys I have a soft spot in my heart for the old Heath Co.
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Re: Heathkit is Back!

Post by JR. »

Bill Wilson wrote:When I left as service manager of the Nashvile MCI dealer in early 78 to open my own studio equipment sales, service & design co.; most of my test equipment was Heaths laboratory series built from kits. The compliment consisted of 2 channel scope, 2 ac vtvm's, linear/log swept function generator, I.M analyser, & X/Y plotter to record the results from the Innovonics 1/3 octave RTA w room reverb measurement capability.

I recently replaced a couple of shorted tantalum caps in the swept function generator & it is good as new & the AC VTVM's still work perrfectly. I met Bruno 2000 at Bob Richardsons studio in early 78, on a service trip.

Like a lot of other older guys I have a soft spot in my heart for the old Heath Co.
I have a (large) pile of old Heathkit test equipment including what was once a pretty serious computer (H-11) in my back room. AFAIK it is pretty much dead. I kept the scope in service past it's normal lifetime by glueing a replacement pot to the front for scope trigger i think, but it just became too flaky to use (I bought a nice small tek scope).

I used to use my old heathkit thd analyzer with the product output feeding an also old/used/marginal spectrum analyzer. The two working together extended my measurement range downward a couple tens of dB, but I had to run the heathkit path 10db cooler than normal 100%, so it's own path distortion would not corrupt my measurements. My old THD analyzer released it's smoke the last time I turned it on, and when I opened it up, it did not look worthwhile to fix (probably 10+ years ago now). My old spectrum analyzer was old when I bought it in the '70s, surely an antique now.

Back in the day, I modified my IM analyzer to make and use 19kHz:20kHz 1:1 for IMD, and it proved a useful bench tool for design, especially of phono preamps back in the '70s-'80s... I've lost track of it and several other old bench pieces, perhaps under some pile.

I ran into one tech out in CA who fixed and collected old heathkit gear, but he wasn't willing to pay the postage for me to ship him my old tired soldiers.

JR
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