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

[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.

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.

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.

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.