Heathkit Educational Systems Closes Shop For Good

scharkalvin writes with this excerpt from the American Radio Relay League's site: "'For the second time since 1992, Heathkit Educational Services (HES) has shuttered its doors. Rumors of the legendary kit-building company's demise were posted on QRZ.com, with several readers bringing the news to the attention of the ARRL. In August 2011, Heathkit announced it was returning to the kit building business, and in September, that it would once again be manufacturing Amateur Radio kits. ... On LinkedIn, a popular networking site, HES Chief Executive Officer Lori Marciniak listed her employment ending at Heathkit as of March 2012. Likewise, Heathkit's Marketing and Sales Director Ernie Wake listed his employment ending in April 2012. An unsubstantiated report on Wikipedia states that "[in] December 2011, Heathkit Educational Systems laid off most employees and in March 2012, the company indefinitely suspended operations."' It looks like Heathkit is gone for good. Their plans on re-entering the kit market died with the current economy."

Comments

Sad

[DaMattster]

This is a sad day for education in America. I remember as a kid building stuff with HeathKit products. I guess no one wants to learn how things work and build them anymore. This, I would guess, is prime example of how education is dwindling. I am a proponent of lifelong learning too.

Re:Sad

[cornface]

I think it is less that "people" aren't interested in how things work, anymore, and more that nobody cares about amateur radio or clunky robots.

The modern generation of people who would have been building Heathkit things years ago are building weird stuff out of Lego robotics or writing software, or any number of other outlets for inquisitiveness and ingenuity that didn't exist 30 years ago.

Re:Sad

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It depends on whether they were killed by apathy or by arduinos...

The advent of the intertubes seems to have led to an incredible increase in the ease of sourcing parts and learning about designs(unless you need a part in-store, in which case maybe Radio Shack can stop pushing cell plans on you long enough to dig up a yellowed package of resistors from ~1985 and sell it to you for $5...) That must be a bit of a squeeze on the margins of bottom and top ends of the former demand for kit-built products.

If, on the other hand, people used to care a lot more, that would be an unfortunate sign.

Re:Sad

[TarpaKungs]

Me too. In the UK, HeathKit were pretty big. I remember their Freezer Door Alarm (simple but effective), but the best was their plasma Alarm Clock. Beautiful display (better than LED and LCD), nice and loud, reliable and direct mains driven (no crappy wall wart). Being frequency locked to the mains also meant no long term drift - I even remember the 50/60 Hz jumper setting that was carefully explained in the excellent manual. No shop bought alarm has measured up since - even the 60kHz radio time signal ones mostly have crappy LCD displays with poor backlighting. Doesn't anyone make decent alarm clocks anymore?

Re:Sad

[Thanshin]

One day every kid will have cheap access to a computer and a 3D printer.

In that environment, a genius will appear and change the world.

Re:Sad

[TarpaKungs]

I think it is that there is too much brain dead easy entertainment. My kids, given the chance, will ask to watch Netflix, fiddle with their computers (and I mean play online games, not even read Wikipedia or look for interesting stuff on YouTube). Then there is TV with 58 channels and 1% good content (which they will usually not find with odd exceptions). And modern electronics is perceived to be "hard" (well, it is, kind of) so "therefore anything simple enough to be do-able, must be boring". And yet, when I force them to do something like wire up a "2 way lighting circuit" with batteries and an LED, they actually find it interesting. But they are not bored enough by default to seek to do these things for themselves. That I think is the crux of the problem.

Re:Sad

[cruff]

I was really disappointed with the oscilloscope kit. I took pains to build it carefully, but the high voltage supply kept dying, so I could never really use the scope. I even sent it in for repair and it worked for all of a few weeks before it died for the same reason again. The only thing I kept from it were the probes and I repurposed part of the case as a anti-squirrel guard for a bird feeder.

Re:Sad

[John Bokma]

My 5 yo daughter and 2 yo son are crazy about robots. When my daughter was younger she loved the R2D2 we got at Burger King. Later I bought the small R2D2 with sound effects.

For Children's Day -- I live in Mexico -- I bought Fisher Price Trio, the set that has a robot (amongst other models) on the box. And guess which model both my children love the most.... correct, the robot.

I soon want to try to teach my daughter some basic soldering skills. They also love to play with tools, for example, see: Hammer Time with Alice and Adam. In my opinion, it's not about pushing tech on children, just making it available and let them discover the fun if they are interested.

And no, children are not getting adult tools in day care, or a soldering iron... So there is certainly a task for parents here. But I have it easy, I work at home, so my children see me do things like cleaning a computer, connecting things, programming, etc. Also I have a huge book collection, including a lot of books for (older) children that in my opinion libraries should have ;-).

As for Heatkit: sorry to read this. On the other hand, when I was 13 yo I desoldered parts from old TVs, made holes in a piece of acrylic plastic, and used that to support the components. I made "traces" with pieces of stripped wire. Oh, and I used a soldering iron for plumbing jobs, so I had to be very careful. And yeah, one day I accidentally picked it up by the wrong end. So, if you want to experiment with electronics there are plenty of options, no need for kits. Moreover, nowadays one can find countless circuit diagrams online, with instructions. Back in those days, I had to rely on the Elektuur (Dutch edition of Elektor).

Re:Sad

[tipo159]

I think it is less that "people" aren't interested in how things work, anymore, and more that nobody cares about amateur radio or clunky robots.

I don't know about clunky robots, but, as posted here a few months ago, there is now a record number of ham radio operator licensees in the US. The statement "nobody cares about amateur radio" is uninformed.

Look at the timeline. Announce that they were back in the kit business in August. Announce that they were making amateur radio kits in September. Lay off most of the employees in December. Sounds like something else was going on if they only had a couple months to make the "return to kits" plan work.

Re:Sad

[swordgeek]

There were three major factors that lead to Heathkit's success, which are no longer true.

1) The cost of manufacturing an item was significantly higher than the cost of the parts.
2) Items were sufficiently simple (or at least discrete) that they could be made at home.
3) Electronics were expensive!

Consider that at one point you could order a kit for about 60% of the price of the finished item. This could save you the modern-day equivalent of hundreds of dollars, and you could assemble it in a week or so.

Nowadays, a chunk of electronics is worth about a hundred bucks or so. Turning it into a kit would be _more_ expensive, and would take three minutes to snap together, if it could be done at home at all.

Where would their customer base come from anyway?

[sl4shd0rk]

Sad to see it go because it's kind of iconic of a culture who grew up to be scientists and engineers. Something really rare these days. The majority of kids these days are either out playing soccer or inside on the Xbox, DS or whatever. The majority have no more interest in Space than occasionally glancing up at the moon and no more interest in electrical engineering than how many gigs and how to plug it in.

I think kids were more fascinated with technology in the 70s because there wasn't much of it around. Even color TV wasn't mainstream. These days, kids are saturated with it. The thought of building something just doesn't appeal to them.

I don't think the market would have been there for Heathkit. The puttering around of a bunch of old geezers just isn't enough to run a company on.

Re:didn't die with the economy

[Yvan256]

That seems contrary to the growth of companies like SparkFun, Adafruit, the popularity of Arduinos, etc.

annoying

[roc97007]

What annoys me is that a Zuckerberg or a Simonyi or a Cameron could bankroll Heathkit, one of the root enablers of geekdom and a true part of technical history in the US, for less than they spend on tropical fish, and for less of their attention than merely uttering the phrase "make it happen".

Yes, I know, Heathkit chose bad timing to reenter the kit business. They should have laid low, held onto their IP, and waited until the economy was on an upswing. And no company is too big, or too small, or too geeky, to fail. But surely Heathkit deserves more.

There are other kit makers out there

[cnaumann]

Check out Ramsey Electronics sometime. I have build several of there kits with my kids. My only gripe with them is that they do not offer the source code for any of there microcontroller-based projects, and seemed to get offended when I asked.

They killed themselves

[morgauxo]

At the time Heathkit stopped producing kits their kit business WAS profitable. Their executives just didn't want to be in that business anymore. They wanted to solely be an education company. At the time there were all sorts of articles stating this.

Here's a question, once they dropped the kits who was their customer?

Schools? Certainly not. Schools are busy teaching a state defined curriculum that does little more for teaching kids about technology and building things than would a lifetime spent finger painting. They weren't going to buy anything from Heath. If they thought schools were going to keep them in business then I would like to know what they were smoking!

Universities? Maybe... I don't know, any EEs out there want to speak up and say they did or did not use Heath materials in their classes? I'm guessing not As a CS major I never had a class with any sort of company provided program. It was just textbooks, mostly only read in certain parts and out of order following the professor's personal syllabus. Is EE different? Do universities use Heath for EE? Come on EE majors, respond and let me know!

Were they going to make a living selling courses to individuals? I haven't checked their offerings in quite a while and their site currently says to call for prices. When I did check some years ago I could have just about obtained a degree from an accredited university for the price. Why would anyone buy a course from Heath?

Was this the wrong time to get back into the kit business? I really doubt it. With the maker movement of today? Sure, most of society is very non-technical, non-geek preferring a night of brain-dead reality tv over building something but has it ever been any different? If you got in your Delorian and went back to the 50s when Heathkit was in it's prime do you really think you could pick any average person off the street, question them and expect to hear about the great new kit they assembled last Friday night? Yeah, right! But would you find anything like today's maker movement? People so into making that they commit to creating organizations with overhead like hackerspaces? I think this is a better time for a kit business then there has been in a long time, maybe ever. Heath came back with too little too late. Did they even really intend to succeed?

The mystery to me is what has kept Heath around all this time since they first discontinued kits? My suspicion is that nothing has. I don't think they were trying, I think they were just disassembling the company very very slowly so the money they made years ago could go into somebody's pocket without getting them in trouble. That's my theory anyway.

Re:Nostalgia for nostalgia's sake?

[morgauxo]

"And very difficult to keep viable from a business perspective." Umm -- it's called AMATEUR radio for a reason! Still manufacturers such as Yaseu, Kenwood, ICom, Wouxon, TenTec and probably others seem to do all right, as do several large vendors and numerous small ones.

"Clinging to nostalgia for nostalgia's sake" -- What's wrong with that? Not every ham is in to old school gear, hams also get into things like SDR, digital audio/data, etc... but for those that get nostalgic for the glowing warm tubes of an old boat anchor what's wrong with them indulging themselves?

"Kind of fun too" -- What more point do you need?

"You want to learn how things work? You fire up GNUradio and hack a flow-graph" -- Ok, that's one viable method to learn something and certainly not something I would discourage anyone from doing. Real devices still do use components though. I've never seen a consumer SDR with the exception of some ham equipment though so I'm not sure how much it will teach you about the devices around you. GNURadio was started by a ham btw

"Transceivers can be bought by the hand-full now - they are the 'new' discreet components." -- Really? Where? Do tell! I suppose there are some low speed single channel data only transcievers that are pretty affordable. Then there are more advanced things like Xbee which I certainly wouldn't want to buy by the handful out of my pocket! If you know a source of transcievers that are capable of voice and data and video and all the other things hams do and a normal person could afford to buy 'by the handful' then please share!!

"...there are very real reasons why the majority of people no longer..." -- The majority of people don't really do much of anything! Especially anything one would discuss on Slashdot!

"Not at all surprising that a business built on an dead model didn't survive." -- Ahh... I agree with you there! But what was Heath's business model? Sell expensive courses in a day when MIT, Stanford and others are giving them away for free while vaguely promising to eventually sell a small number of kits?

killed by bad decisions

[wmeyer]

As stated in another post: "At the time Heathkit stopped producing kits their kit business WAS profitable. Their executives just didn't want to be in that business anymore. They wanted to solely be an education company."

Problem is, Heath's educational stuff was always pretty lame. In audio and amateur gear, they really shone. And they made some really nice test gear, too. I still have my Heath Audio Oscillator, and the Distortion Analyzer. Neither was quite as good as an HP, but they were way less money, and were good candidates for hobbyist upgrades.

Their educational stuff was not only lame, but overpriced. The rest of their offerings were solid value. Even their PC-clone (808x, 1983 or so) was well done and good value.

I built Heathkits, so did my dad. I'd say they will be missed, but I have missed them since they bailed on the business that made them.

different filter caps, please

[swschrad]

the wax-ender filter caps used on countless scopes out of Heath were not reliable and shorted a lot. replace with epoxy-fill from some source like CDE, and as long as you didn't kill the transformer, you should have it fixed for good.

if you did kill the transformer, flip some filament transformer insulated to 1500 or 2500 volts backwards, feed from the AC line, and that will suffice.

There has never been a golden age.

[DerekLyons]

I think it is that there is too much brain dead easy entertainment.

There's always been brain dead and easy options for entertainment - and the type of kids who sought out Heathkits have always been in a distinct minority. The golden age you allude to never existed.
 
On top of which, as another poster said, kids that are interested in that kind of thing today have Mindstorm, or simulation games, or programming, or other things that weren't available back in Heathkit's heyday.