[Heathkit] Heathkit SB Essay

[Bob McGraw - K4TAX]

AMEN!


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <MikeDoolin at aol.com>
To: <dpividal at tampabay.rr.com>; <heathkit at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2007 4:07 PM
Subject: Re: [Heathkit] Heathkit SB Essay


> 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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