The Heathkit Legacy (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The Heathkit Legacy (2013)

people.ohio.edu

57 pointsdcminter32 comments

I used to love the Heathkit catalogs as a kid, but never bought anything, because, by that time, everything cool seemed prohibitively expensive.

(But I could save up my money to buy (overpriced) parts from Radio Shack, and products to tear down from garage sales, and build my own designs of simpler circuits and machines.)

Two of the coolest things I still recall:

* The "Most Accurate Clock". http://www.n8obj.com/Heathkit.html http://www.prc68.com/I/HeathkitGC1000.shtml http://www.nixie.dk/~jthomas/gc1000.html

* The Hero series of robots, which you could build yourself. The Hero 1 could include an arm and speech synthesizer. (There were many other robot toys and ill-fated consumer products at the time, but the arm that looked like it had a lot of flexibility in manipulating the environment put it in a different class.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERO_(robot)

IIRC, at some point, Heathkit were also doing PC and video terminal kits together with some kind of training program (there were also non-kit Heath/Zenith products like those), and maybe an oscilloscope?

(A scope was another piece of bench equipment that was prohibitively expensive for most kids at the time, and I couldn't get access to one until I started taking classes at the wonderful community college. But a kid could do a lot of things with a Radio Shack $5 soldering iron, $25 multimeter, and a ~+5V TTL level bench power supply that was 4 AA batteries and a diode.)

Of note: https://shop.heathkit.com/shop/product/most-reliable-clocktm...

On a lark ordered one. It's not the most _accurate_ clock, but rather the most _reliable_. Either way, seems like a fun weekend project!

Thanks for the push to lookup heathkit again (though this appears to be a reboot).

I built several Heathkits when I was younger. The last thing I built was a SW717 (lower right corner of the stack on the site). It never worked well because of a loud hum. I assumed the hum was from poor power regulation so I did everything I could to improve it, but it was still awful.

I sold it cheap to a Polish immigrant I knew at work, and I told him about the problem it had. He was determined to fix it and he finally did. The problem was poor shielding on the power transformer. The magnetic field was coupling into another transformer in the audio stage. He put some brass shielding around both transformers and it was extremely quiet after that.

I was pretty pissed off at Heathkit for either giving me the wrong parts, or maybe just having a bad design. I learned from others with similar experiences that Heathkit had a poor reputation for having problems like this. I never bought another one.

(Some ham radio operators refer to them as "Heathquit".)

Edit: I read the write-up on the SW717 at their site here: https://people.ohio.edu/postr/bapix/SW-717.htm They mention the hum, but claim they fixed it by reducing power supply ripple. That was definitely not the cause of the hum on my radio. I reduced the ripple to 20mV as measured with an oscilloscope, but the hum persisted.

Or “Griefkit” was another name. But a lot of the early and mid vintage ham gear was decent and a good value. I built or owned 2nd hand several back in the day. A former coworker of mine that lived for a while close to Benton Harbor said that a lot depended on which engineer at Heath did the design work. The resulting kits were uneven because the talent was uneven and they did not leverage opportunities for collaboration.

They must have gone downhill then. They had a reputation early of being quality kits with quality components.

They had a good reputation early on. One of my uncles built a Heathkit color television in the late 60's and it spent more time broken than working. I cannot vouch for his soldering skills, and that was likely the problem with many of them.

In my case, I had about a year of professional soldering (electronic assembly) experience when I put the SW717 together. All the solder joints were shiny and perfect. I think I was about 17 when I built it. I sold it at 19 and got something much better a few years later -- a Kenwood TS-440S/AT.

I worked my way through college as an electronics assembly technician. So I got very good at soldering, and had no trouble at all with the Heathkits. I expect if someone used a cheapo iron, and didn't have someone show them how to solder correctly, they'd have major maddening unreliability issues.

P.S. one trick to save yourself lots of grief is, when done soldering the board, get a nice big magnifying glass. Before powering up the board, go over every joint with the glass. Look for any whiskers, bridges, crummy looking joints, wires too close together, etc. You'll be very glad you took the 5 minutes!

My twitter profile picture is a picture of my Heathkit PDP-11 system. Yes, I built it all and it all worked perfectly when I turned it on!

https://twitter.com/WalterBright

I loved Heathkit.

(Except the ultrasonic cleaner. That sure was a dud. Sold it on Ebay to some collector.)

With an H-19! I'm jealous... (I gotta get my two H-11A boxes running with the pair of 8" floppies. Another 'rainy day' project!). In the day, I built 3 H-19s to save a few bucks, and that was a LOT of work. Another one which was even more a pain to assemble was the kit form of the ADM-3A. Still, for the time, it was a lot of terminal for the $$.

My coworkers at Boeing thought I was nuts to have bought a 64K memory card for it (maxing it out) for $600. I had to show the card around at work :-)

How sweet it was to have, at last, my very own PDP-11 at home!

Later on I bought a 6Mb hard disk drive, and designed and built an interface card for it, and wrote a bootstrap loader. 6Mb was, like, infinite storage!

The paper taped to the monitor was the screen editing commands for TECO.

George, did you see the Firesign Theatre thread at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27329497

(George Tirebiter was a character in a Firesignt Theatre routine.)

It seems that Heathkit may have been revived somewhat:

https://heathkit.com

Now I want to buy their surface-mount soldering ruler! ;-)

That's kinda cool.

Heathkits were great. I assembled a number of them for my stepfather and for myself. My favorite was the multi-band short wave radio receiver which I used to listen to sputnik.

A neighbor enlisted by stepfather's aid in troubleshooting a color TV kit he had assembled. I remember the workmanship was picture perfect, matching the photos in the assembly manual exactly. But turning on the power did nothing. A bit of investigation turned up the reason. The entire kit had been constructed using Liquid Solder, construction adhesive most often used to bond metal and other strong materials such as concrete--and a non-conductor of electicity..

My father had a similar experience building the Heathkit color TV. In his case, the problem was his use of a giant soldering iron - suitable for soldering gutters, I think. Fortunately he knew a Bell Telephone repairman who resoldered all the connections, and we had color TV.

Using a Weller thermostatically controlled iron made a night and day difference in the quality of soldered joints. Always bad joints with the cheapo irons, always good joints with the Weller!

Heathkit was my intro to electronics in the 1960s and early 70s. My father gave me a Heathkit electronics lab that consisted of a board with a bunch of components, spring connectors, various lengths of pre-stripped and tinned wires, and a project book full of fascinating experiments that I did over and over. He also built our family color television and stereo receiver from Heathkit projects. I remember watching him work on them in his shop after dinner, soldering components into place for hours. Both of those units lasted a good long time, too.

Got a Heathkit digital thermometer kit for xmas when I was a young teen. Soldered for hours that day - so much so that I was soldering in my dreams that night. Kit worked on the first try and we used it for years. Great fun and great practice soldering.

Dad build a Heathkit electronic ignition (Capacitive Discharge Ignition CP-1060) for our car which worked flawlessly as long as we owned it. This was back '72 when you had to change the points and plugs regularly on most cars because they wore out. Clearly this kind of ignition was the wave of the future!

Built my entire ham shack from Heathkit's as a teenager. Still have an SB-101 transceiver and SB-200 linear amplifier in storage. They brought me so many great memories I can't bear to part from them.

A team based in Arizona tried to relaunch Heathkit a few years ago. It included several Heathkit veterans and they even talked about possibly manufacturing them in the Benton Harbor area. Lots of blog posts and social media but I'm not sure if they ever released any products. Does anyone know?

In the late 1970’s, at the dawn of genetic engineering, Heathkit high-voltage regulated power supplies, available for less than $50 I believe, were widely used for nucleic acid gel electrophoresis. They worked great, and were 1/4 the cost of purpose-built supplies from Biorad and other biotechnology manufacturers (which were much cheaper than HP power supplies). Even today, working models go for more than $200 on eBay.

Slightly off topic, but that article should be required reading for anybody writing documentation. Wouldn't it be nice when trying to use some new framework or device if the writer not only imparted knowledge of the product but also the underlying principles that make it work!

Instead you get some huge corporation like Apple or Microsoft whose idea of documentation is some kind of rigid recipe stuck on their website that is out of date or missing some critical step that the writer assumes is common knowledge. Or Texas Instruments woeful bluetooth stack where the documentation is basically their online forum, a giant heap of misery where perplexed engineers are advised to check if the device has power and if it does, can they reproduce the error on the 2017 release before the Ti engineers get involved.

As an example I just abandoned trying to set up a cross platform app in xamarin for this reason. Flutter docs are much better so even if its rubbish I am already further along.

> huge corporation like Apple or Microsoft whose idea of documentation is some kind of rigid recipe stuck on their website that is out of date or missing some critical step that the writer assumes is common knowledge.

Microsoft at least is very “dynamic” in their documentation. In one scenario, we had a case open for a product that was implemented within the documented limits, but not working.

Then the ticket was closed — the documentation was changed to a threshold that happened to line up with our previous, working workload.

Lots of vintage manuals in PDF form here: https://worldradiohistory.com/Electronics_Catalogs.htm

TFA is from the now defunct magazine Monitoring Times which was about ham radio, shortwave listening and radio in general.

People interested in such topics may enjoy a successor magazine, Spectrum Monitor [1], which covers similar topics and has had some of the same writers as Monitoring Times (Note: I have no affiliation with either magazine).

[1] https://www.thespectrummonitor.com/

edit: Corrected name of Spectrum Monitor which I botched the first time.

I think they were kinda rare so I was fortunate to grow up in a city with a retail Heathkit store?

Was too young to really appreciate it or take advantage of the kits, I would ride my bicycle there and look at everything though and get the latest catalog. All I was able to afford/build was an AM radio.

Watching the Heathkit computers come out in the TRS-80 days was amazing.

I'm very sorry I gave away my H11. (sob)

Did you solder it yourself? That must have taken many weeks!?

My dad built a heathkit dot matrix printer for his TRS-80. I fondly remember waking up at 2am numerous times to that loud thing. It was the loudest printer I think I'd ever heard.

Ha dot matrix was fun. Then the evolution of multi-pass and very dense pinheads. Then color before we moved on to other tech.

Remember how big the parallel port and how thick the cable?

All those pins. And they eventually found a way to transfer data at a whopping 500kbps over parallel vs 128kbps for rs-232. How far we've come. Seriously!

I enjoyed building a Heathkit IM-18 VTVM as a teenager. It was a great experience and I used the meter for a few decades.

What's the best modern replacement for Heathkit?

Something to get newbies started in electronics.

Arduino?

Places like Sparkfun. I'll browse that website the same way I'd drool over the Heathkit catalog. Difference is I can now afford to order something, and there is more of an emphasis on development kits and less on final product. That's OK, because building was the magic, not having.

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