Heathkit

Heathkits were products of the Heath Company, Benton Harbor, Michigan. Their products included electronic test equipment, home audio equipment, ham radio equipment, and the influential Heath H-8 hobbyist computer, which were sold in kit form for assembly by the purchaser.

The Heath Company was originally founded as an aircraft company in the early 1900s by Edward Bayard Heath. Starting in 1926 it sold a light aircraft, the Heath Parasol, in kit form. Heath died during a 1931 test flight. In 1935, Howard Anthony purchased the Heath Company in 1935, bought a large stock of surplus wartime electronic parts, and designed and marketed a mail order oscilloscope kit, with great success.

From 1940 through the mid-1980s Heath produced dozens of Heathkit products. Heathkits were influential in shaping two generations of electronic hobbyists. The Heathkit sales premise was that by investing the time to assemble a Heathkit, the purchaser could build something comparable to a factory-built product at a very significantly lower cash cost. During those decades the premise was basically valid. Commercial factory-built electronic products were constructed from generic, discrete components such as vacuum tubes, tube sockets, and resistors, and essentially hand-wired and assembled. The home kit-builder could perform the same assembly tasks himself. In the case of their most expensive product, the Thomas electronic organ, building the Heathkit version represented a very substantial savings.

One category in which Heathkit enjoyed great popularity was amateur radio. Ham radio operators had frequently needed to build their equipment from scratch before the advent of kits, with the concern of procuring all the parts separately and relying on often-experimental designs. Kits brought the convenience of all parts being supplied together and the assurance of a predictable finished product, and many Heathkit models became well-known in the ham radio community.

The exterior fit and finish of the Heathkit enclosures was not quite up to the standards of most factory-built products, but a Heathkit amplifier did not look out of place in a living room. The technical characteristics of many Heathkits were good. The ordinary consumer would, of course, buy a factory-built phonograph from the likes of RCA; but an audiophile who was serious enough to assemble a system from individual components could and frequently did give serious consideration to Heathkit products.

In the case of electronic test equipment, Heathkits often filled a low-end niche. Where a Hewlett-Packard product might have metal vernier dials or ten-turn pots with digital readouts, a Heathkit would might use a simple plastic pointer and a scale silk-screened onto the front panel. A $40 Heathkit oscilloscope might not be remotely comparable to a factory-built oscilloscope—but there were no $40 (or even $100) factory-built oscilloscopes.

Building a Heathkit required time, patience, and the ability to follow directions; given these, the risk of failure was small. Heathkits were absolutely complete except for tools. The instruction books were models of clarity, beginning with basic lessons on soldering technique, and proceeding with explicit directions, illustrated with line drawings, and a box to check off as each task was accomplished.

No knowledge of electronics was needed to assemble a Heathkit. The assembly process did not teach much about electronics, but provided a great deal of what could have been called "electronics literacy," such as the ability to identify tube pin numbers or read a resistor color code. Many hobbyists began by assembling Heathkits, became familiar with the appearance of components like capacitors, transformers, and tubes, and were motivated to find out just what these components actually did. Heath developed a relationship with electronics correspondence schools, where they supplied electronic kits to be assembled as part of the course, with the school basing its texts around the kit.

There were other vendors of electronic equipment in kit form; Allied Electronics, a electronic parts supply house, had its KnightKits, Radio Shack made a few forays into this market, Dyna Corp made its audio products available in kit form, as did H. H. Scott, Inc., and many garage industries supplied less polished kits based on build-it-yourself articles in the electronics hobbyist press; but none had anything comparable to the influence of Heathkits.

The last great flourishing of the electronic product in kit form was probably the 1978 introduction of the Heathkit H-8 computer. The earliest computers had been sold as kits to begin with. Unlike some of the other companies, Heath had real experience in producing electronics in kit form and the Heath name carried confidence with it.

By the 1980s, the introduction of printed circuit boards, integrated circuits, discount pricing, and overseas assembly eroded the basic Heathkit premise. Assembling a kit might still be fun, but it could no longer save much money. The switch in industrial design to surface mount components finally made it impossible for the home assembler to construct an electronic device which was competitive with assembly line factory products.

The Heathkit company still exists (and is still located in Benton Harbor), and supplies electronics education products, but has not sold Heathkits since the mid-1980s.

External links

• Offical Site (http://www.heathkit.com/)
• The Heathkit Virtual Museum (http://www.heathkit-museum.com/) History, pictures and descriptions of many Heathkits, including the classic Heathkit VTVM (http://www.heathkit-museum.com/test/im-11.shtml)
• Heath H8 information (http://wa1gsf.home.comcast.net/index.html), including a simulator