[Heathkit] Heathkit SB Essay

[MikeDoolin at aol.com]

As someone who worked at Heath, had constant contact with the Engineering and 
Manual departments, and who was one of the Hams at Heath, I just have to jump 
into this. I'll preface this by noting that I wrote the Heathkit catalogs 
from 1968 thru 1974 and was the only Ham in the Advertising department (ex 
WB8CDU, now KC2TP). During that time I built somewhere around 300 Heathkits.

-     Like any electronic product, Heathkits were designed and engineered to 
deliver maximum benefit at minimum cost. But there was that little oddity: 
they were designed to be assembled by someone else! This changed the equation 
considerably in most cases. That is why you see pre-assembled critical items like 
LMOs and tuners etc. That also explains a lot about their physical and 
mechanical design. Real people - often with very minimal skills - had to build these 
things and get them to work.

-     The rate of successful assembly for Heathkits overall was staggeringly 
high, well into the very high 90% range for nearly all products, no matter how 
complex. My first wife - who could barely tell one end of a soldering iron 
from the other and had absolutely NO electronics experience whatsoever - put 
together the high end color TV with no help from me. It worked when she plugged 
it in, she did the adjustments by herself, and we used the set for years. Her 
story is pretty typical. We used to get dozens of letters a day from amazed 
first-time kit builders, some of them in the early years of grammar school, all 
the way to people in their 80s. If you look at old Heathkit catalogs you'll see 
these comments scattered about the pages. I didn't need to invent these 
comments when I was writing the catalogs - they were real.

-     The worst builders were engineers. They were forever second-guessing 
the manual, the basic design, etc. I see a little of that on this list from time 
to time.

-     The best builders were people like my ex-wife, people with no 
electronics experience. They took the Heathkit manual at face value, trusted the 
instructions, did what they were told and got a functioning product out of it.

-     The process to produce a kit was very lengthy, often lasting more than 
a year. The manual was the critical issue. We had a procedure called 
proofbuilding that insured the accuracy and completeness of the manual, and from that, 
the success of the kit itself. This entailed giving the kit and draft manual 
to a selection of Heath employees who built the kit and critiqued the manual 
(we were encouraged to be brutal but not unkind!). We kept track of time, 
problems, questions etc. We were encouraged to question EVERYTHING, whether we had 
any engineering or tech writing experience or not. Proofbuild manuals were 
typically filled with hundreds of comments, and dozens of separate pages of 
suggestions were not uncommon. Being selected to do a proofbuild was a very big 
deal, and we all took the responsibility very seriously. We turned the assembled 
kit back to Engineering and they worked with the Manual dept to get any bugs 
out of the design and/or manual. If it was a particularly difficult kit the 
process might have been repeated a second (or in very rare cases, even a third) 
time. The builder got the kit back after Engineering and the Manual departments 
had reviewed it. Some kits were proofbuilt by only 10 or 12 employees, others 
by a couple or three dozen. Ham kits were always built by both hams and 
non-hams.

-     Ham kit products were designed by hams. The ham engineering department 
was a separate department that did nothing but design ham products, and 
virtually everyone in it, from the dept head to the technicians, were licensed. Hams 
were also scattered all over the company - the President at that time (Dave 
Nurse) was a ham, several of the product managers and department heads were 
hams, many of the engineers and techs were hams, there were hams in the Manual 
dept, production, purchasing, etc etc. When the catalogs or ads bragged about 
the Hams at Heath, it was the truth. They were all over the place, and they held 
considerable power at all levels of the company.

-     The goals of this fairly complex, lengthy process was to insure, as 
nearly as possible, that the kit builder could put the kit together and have it 
function correctly, that product returns to the company were held to an 
absolute minimum, and that the product was profitable.

-     The target builder was always someone with virtually no electronics or 
kit building experience. This lowest common denominator approach helped insure 
success, but it also explains some of the design apparent in the kits.

-     As an aside, when I was in the Navy some years before my stint at 
Heath, we used Heathkit manuals as examples of what good, clear, accurate tech 
writing looked like. My job was to write manuals to assemble and disassemble 
nuclear weapons. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about the relationships 
there.


I don't have much Heathkit gear left (lost it all in a divorce years ago), 
but I will always remember fondly my 6+ years there. It was an exciting place, 
full of greatly talented and very nice people who were doing something that to 
this day is pretty much unique. I was very sorry to see them go out of the kit 
business.

People who are critical of Heath's quality, durability, reliability etc are 
certainly entitled to their opinions. But the company was not an 'ordinary' 
electronics products company, and its products were imagined and engineered for a 
very unusual and specific market segment. That niche drove the products to be 
designed in certain ways using certain standards and philosophies that might 
seem alien to someone who never worked there, or to someone more familiar with 
standard commercial products.

But that philosophy seemed to work just fine for the literally millions of 
kits that were sold over some 40 years. And as someone else has pointed out, 
there are still lots and lots of Heathkits still being used every day, by hams 
and non-hams.

That longevity says everything about the ultimate success of the company and 
the design philosophy that created that success. The Drakes and Collins (and 
later the Icoms and Yaesus etc) all made fine gear.

But there will always only be one Heathkit.

Mike Doolin
Rochester NY
One of the Hams at Heath
Ex WB8CDU
Now KC2TP



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