Looks like Heathkit updated their site sometime in April. Still sparse, just links to refurbished gear on ebay.
I was hoping they had some offerings, but nothing yet. I don't check the site often.
Cheers
Looks like Heathkit updated their site sometime in April. Still sparse, just links to refurbished gear on ebay.
I was hoping they had some offerings, but nothing yet. I don't check the site often.
Cheers
I thought they went out of business long time ago. Maybe somebody bought the trademark name?
There seems to be a fair bit of nostalgia for this sort of thing, but when faced with the modern reality of very overpriced kits at best middlingly de signed, doing uninteresting things, suddenly reality sets in, the goodwill evaporates and no-one wants to buy.
What could a modern day heathkit really offer?
NT
They did go out of business.
There has been at least one attempt to revive the company as a more modern kit-supplier. I think the current incarnation is at least the second such attempt, by at least the second acquirer of the rights to the Heathkit name.
It's a really difficult "sell", I think. Back in The Day, Heathkit and Dyna and Scott and etc. could sell kits which were at least cost-competitive with what "finished goods" of the same type and quality would go for. Basically, you-the-kit-builder would supply the labor which would otherwise be done by (and paid to) somebody in a factory.
I don't think that's economically possible these days, at least for "mainstream" consumer-electronics devices... mass production, and the "build to the throw-it-away-when-it fails" mentality mean that a kit of decent quality is more expensive than whatever the big factory complex in China turns out by the ten-zillion-lot run this week.
So, such kits are salable only to those who are willing to pay a pretty hefty premium to build it themselves.
Also, with the Internet out there making it possible for independent enthusiast communities and design/kit suppliers to spring up and distribute stuff and share ideas, it's probably harder for a "centralized" kit supplier to gain enough attention and market share to compete and survive.
Audiophiles seem to like that amp, I think the AA-1640.
I thought the TV with the automatic antenna rotor was cool as hell.
Spark fun and other sites (ada fruit) ate heathkits market long ago.
George H.
Previously, when all electronic devices was made with hand soldering, much of the product selling price consisted of the manual labor costs.
Transferring the hand soldering to the end customer, the kit could be sold at much lower price than a ready made device.
These days doing wave soldering will make cheap products, comparing to kit production, in which you have to bag the various components, provide solder instructions and have user support for badly assembled or improperly manually soldered PCBs.
Maybe a real-time spectrum analyzer / scope display plus FFT. The cheap one: good to 8Mhz (the typical xtal used in micros; take samples on each clock transition).
Still, the Chinese kits DO have a draw..
I think you just need to redefine what a "kit" is. Instead of giving the user a bag of parts to solder, give them a few small assembled boards that can be used to make up different devices in different combinations. Include a CPU board of some kind and now they have software to tinker with as well. That is basically what the Arduino is about and they even took great pains to make the software portion easier.
Kits were never about a low cost unit, not really. They were about making something that you understood how it worked.
-- Rick
Kits were very much about making things affordable. The one time I bought o ne it was 1/3 the price of the equivalent finshed item. The kits I designed were all way cheaper than buying the goods finished. To me electronics has always been about saving money while learning or obtaining goods etc.
Today I see kits sold at silly prices. No doubt some folks are willing to p ay, but it sure puts most people off.
NT
I agree if you're talking about GDOs and oscilloscopes.
Heath used to make TVs, though, which were designed to be assembled by ordinary folks, not just hobbyists.
Coincidentally, two Saturdays ago I assembled my first-ever electronic kit: an AADE LC meter. Works great. I built a 38-MHz tank out of a 75 pF NPO monocap and a hand-wound 230-nH inductor. The resonant frequency calculated from the AADE agrees with my Measurements 59 Megacycle Meter to within a couple of tenths of a percent.
This was measuring the GDO frequency with an HP 5315B counter plus a pickup loop made from a coax patch cord and a Pomona BNC-to-clips adapter. I was very pleasantly surprised that the dial on my 1961-ish vintage GDO is still within 0.2% on most ranges, from 1 MHz to 220 MHz. I made a coil for the 400 MHz range, and it was within about the same when I was done. Pretty good. With a highish-Q circuit, there was no measurable frequency pulling until the coupling got very strong.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant
They actually had a retail store in Indy and I worked at Allied radio right across the street. Built a 19" GR169 color TV one summer that was my HS graduation present for 349.00 ! Why -- (in retrospect), I have no idea.
Kits were just for us geeks. What did you guys build?
I built a Knight kit Star roamer, Dynaco stereo 120 and Pat4, the GR169 and some Heathkit test equipment.
Wish I had stuffed my attic with some unopened Eico and Scott audio kits etc -- I'd be a friggin zillionaire.
...as well as learn by doing.
Absolutely! I still feel the thrill I experienced after my first kit I ever built, the luggable Heathkit IBM compatible PC, after many hours of soldering. It worked like a charm when I finally turned on the power. With hindsight, the money I saved was not worth all the work I had to do, but the thrill was worth it. After that I assembled nothing more complex than the Heath Geiger counter and a barking dog alarm.
I think the AA-1800 was Heathkit's pinnacle in audio power amps. It was pretty nice.
Another great kit, not Heathkit, was the Hafler DH-500. Brand new, one could get more than a watt per dollar.
I'd bet that well over 50% of the HeathKit TVs were bought and paid for by the US government. I've probably seen a hundred of them bought with the GI bill. Every month or so, they'd send one board and a "test". The recipient was to build the board and answer questions about its operation and draw a few waveforms. A bunch of engineers where I worked "bought" them and dry-labbed all the "coursework", just to get a "free" TV. They'd already had their degrees before being drafted and wanted their piece of the action.
My first HeatkKit was a VTVM and most complicated was the SB-301 ham receiver, both in high school.
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