Heathkit Declares Bankruptcy & Assets Up For Auction

[Pete, WA2CWA]

From the ARRL web site dated 7/24/12: Heathkit Education Company has declared bankruptcy and has officially closed its doors after defaulting on its lease.

For more of the story, go here: http://www.arrl.org/news/heathkit-declares-bankruptcy-closes-for-good-again

And from the Herald-Palladium (this is subscription based so you not be able to access it -ARRL does cover most of the points): http://www.heraldpalladium.com/news/local/disassembly-complete-heathkit-is-no-more/article_c00ffaac-d15b-11e1-a9e7-0019bb2963f4.html

Won't find any DX-100's in this pile but lots of other stuff and definitely some ebay fodder:  http://auction.repocast.com/items.cfm?auction=2904&category=0&location=0&minprice=&maxprice=&page=1

[n2ffl]

Well so much for them getting back into the kit making business!

 

[Pete, WA2CWA]

Well so much for them getting back into the kit making business!

 

A bunch of those initial kits are listed in that bank auction. They probably would fall under the rare category in time to come.

Nice QSO Ron the other night. There is life on 75 meter AM after midnight. 

[Opcom]

RIP Heathkit, there will never be another company like it.

[w1vtp]

It's sad to see the passing of Heathkit..  I'm not surprised.  They moved from the base of customers who made them to another totally different base. 

Then the most recent mistake was to alienate the original customers by having the old manuals removed from general access.  I really do not care how the details played out but when a product line dies out and there are owners or future owners of those products, manuals should have been available.  Ameritron among many other manufacturers make their manuals available at no cost.  Heathkit manuals being made available only as a moneymaking venture was a mistake.  I willingly paid for my EFJ Viking 1 & 2 manuals but taking a peek at them on sites like BAMA gave me what I needed at first - from that point I bought the excellent commercially reproduced manuals.

RIP Heathkit.

Al

[Pete, WA2CWA]

Then the most recent mistake was to alienate the original customers by having the old manuals removed from general access.  I really do not care how the details played out but when a product line dies out and there are owners or future owners of those products, manuals should have been available.    Heathkit manuals being made available only as a moneymaking venture was a mistake. 

Al

Actually Heath Education Systems, after the kit business died in 1992, besides their educational products, also had the business of Vintage Manual Replication Service for all their old products. They never freely gave away their documents. They sold that business in 2009.

[K1JJ]

Yep, time has marched on and the market has changed. Gone are the techno-builder geeks that probably faded out with the original Apple computer kits.   I still remember the Heathkit computer. Wasn't that something?  How about building a Heathkit color TV?

Back in high school a shop teacher told me that he was seeing more and more students who were not excited anymore about building stuff in wood or metal shop class. They would say, "Why bother? I can buy it already built."  This was a clue to Heathkit's demise.

I remember my one and only Heathkit project in 1965. It was their 80 watt solid state guitar amplifer with built in speakers and reverb.  It didn't work when finished so I sent it in for repair. For $25 they replaced the shorted finals and it worked FB for years. Yep, even a 15 year old kid could build one.

Then there was a ham store that refused to take in any more SB-300 line Heathkits on trade. They already had so many with problems (mostly intermittent problems) on the shelf, they were gagging on them....  

The Heathkit Company was a classic and will always be fondly remembered. They really had quite the operation going at their peak.

T

[Opcom]

Its not like the data from bama and other places was ever destroyed. Thousands of people have that stuff and more backed up where it will never be subject to any external control or deletion except by the keeper of his own files. 

As long as the gentleman maintains a lawful claim to it, the material likely won't be appearing publicly.

The thing I value as pointed out is that most of them are absolutely not of the fine reprint quality most equipment owners would prefer. For my money I'd rather have a manual of the same quality appearance as the restored equipment.

[KA3EKH]

Wonder if any of the Heathkit color TV ever worked? Think of all the fun that would have been involved with trying to align the IF, color system and then doing the convergence. Saw one at a Hamfest couple months ago and thought about buying it just for fun. Was a twenty five inch set that also included built in cross hatch generator. I remember being in High School back in the seventies and working in a TV shop at night, all those old vacuum tube color TV sets that weigh a ton, burnt up flybacks and no matter how long you work at it would never be 100% on the convergence, old RCA CTC and Zenith stuff. The thing that killed the TV shops was that by the eighties and nineties you could replace a TV for way less then it cost to repair and the newer sets were also better. Maybe that’s what killed Heathkit, think the Kenwood, Drake and Yeasu stuff cost less and worked better, why pay more to build something that does not work as well?

[ke7trp]

My first thought was if the heathkit manuals can now be posted back on the web where we all can USE THEM.

C

[w1vtp]

Wonder if any of the Heathkit color TV ever worked? Think of all the fun that would have been involved with trying to align the IF, color system and then doing the convergence. Saw one at a Hamfest couple months ago and thought about buying it just for fun. Was a twenty five inch set that also included built in cross hatch generator. I remember being in High School back in the seventies and working in a TV shop at night, all those old vacuum tube color TV sets that weigh a ton, burnt up flybacks and no matter how long you work at it would never be 100% on the convergence, old RCA CTC and Zenith stuff. The thing that killed the TV shops was that by the eighties and nineties you could replace a TV for way less then it cost to repair and the newer sets were also better. Maybe that’s what killed Heathkit, think the Kenwood, Drake and Yeasu stuff cost less and worked better, why pay more to build something that does not work as well?

A co-worker got a heath kit color TV for free using some sort of veterans job training exercise (forgot the actual name).  He built it - got it working and enjoyed his free color TV.  OH yes, he was a pretty good technician in the shop - one of the best.

Al

[K4RT]

As long as the gentleman maintains a lawful claim to it, the material likely won't be appearing publicly.

Whoever purchased from Heathkit the rights to their manuals may actually own much less than what he or she asserts to own. I suspect that a good deal of the boatanchor material was in the public domain long before the purchase.

[AJ1G]

Wonder if any of the Heathkit color TV ever worked? Think of all the fun that would have been involved with trying to align the IF, color system and then doing the convergence.

In 1972 or thereabouts, two other EE major brothers (both also hams) of my frat at URI, Phi Kappa Psi, convinced the rest of the us that it would be a good idea to buy and have them build one of those Heath 25 inchers.  We installed it in a wall of the chapter room, the plan was that it would be above a bar that eventually was to be built in front of it.  It did work, but it was a real PITA to keep properly aligned, especially since most of the alignment adjustments were on the rear of the set which was in another room.  You either had to take the thing down off the shelf to work on it (a two man lift), or slide it back far enough so that you could squint around it at a mirror in front of the screen on the other side of the wall. And it needed to be realigned a lot.  No one was very happy with it, and those two guys always took a lot of gas about their idea. After they graduated, I got stuck with trying to keep the thing working properly, without much success.  

One of them had an HW101 in their room, and I had my WB2ZPS Apache (reconverted to use its own modulator vs my HB outboard modulator) and Scott SLRM in my room.  We had a pair of 40 and 20 meter inverted vee dipoles hung from the mast that supported a big TV/FM LP.  The TV/FM antenna fed a distribution system with  an outlet in each room of the house, a relative rarity in those days (the house was built in the late 60s).  With the HF antennas only a few feet below the TV/FM LP, any ham ops really would rip up everyone's TVs and stereos, so we very rarely would go on the air from there.  When I graduated, I left the Apache behind at the W1KMV URI Radio Club station.  Abut 15 years ago, Brown, W1NZR, who was at URI a few years after me, found out that the club at that time had lost permission to use a storage room of theirs and was going to get rid of a lot of old stuff that had accumulated.  Brown and I went up there, and picked through the pile, and there was the Apache, missing most of the tubes, bit otherwise intact.  I took it back, and eventually gave it back to my buddy Steve, KL7JT, now in Sudbury, whom I had bought it from when we were in high school.

[WA3VJB]

A great Time Capsule story, Chris.  
Glad that you not only recovered the TX-1 but that it's (hopefully) gone back on the air.

University stations typically have some persistence, perhaps more so than community club stations that have a physical location. The college club I am associated with (as a two term president) W3EAX, was founded in 1932 and they've had only four moves in 80 years.  

That seems to encourage quite the accumulation of stuff. Time capsules for those who followed us.

I lived on the top floor of a high rise dorm and had a 2m Ringo Ranger on the roof fed with RG 213 out the window. Worked simplex for about a 50 mile range before EAX got their own repeater pair in the newly-expanded "sub-band."

The club itself was fortunate to receive student government funding, and I was able to order a brand new set of Drake Twins from Miamisburg on a university purchase order. THAT was very cool, including being the first to open the factory sealed boxes and get that "new radio" smell.

I should point out that I picked the Drake pair because they had AM capability -- something missing from rivals like the Heath twins, and offerings from Swan, Atlas and others. 

For some reason I seem to remember we were "supposed" to buy a U.S. made product. That may have been part of our club's pitch to receive SGA funding. Detail lost to history.

[W2VW]

Wonder if any of the Heathkit color TV ever worked? Think of all the fun that would have been involved with trying to align the IF, color system and then doing the convergence. Saw one at a Hamfest couple months ago and thought about buying it just for fun. Was a twenty five inch set that also included built in cross hatch generator. I remember being in High School back in the seventies and working in a TV shop at night, all those old vacuum tube color TV sets that weigh a ton, burnt up flybacks and no matter how long you work at it would never be 100% on the convergence, old RCA CTC and Zenith stuff. The thing that killed the TV shops was that by the eighties and nineties you could replace a TV for way less then it cost to repair and the newer sets were also better. Maybe that’s what killed Heathkit, think the Kenwood, Drake and Yeasu stuff cost less and worked better, why pay more to build something that does not work as well?

I assembled a Heath GR-2001 in 1978. As Chris said alignment was a pain and I was not happy with the tradeoffs in convergence.

Still have the set but it suffered a broken neck a couple years back in a freak accident. Hopefully I will find another low miles CRT someday.

A local ham about 25 years ago was a retired TV serviceman. He told me Sony pretty much took a lot of profit out of the business by selling color televisions whose CRTs would retain emission after 3 years.

R.I.P. Heathkit.

[Don, W2DL]

I bought a Heathkit color TV kit sometime in the early 1970's, spent about a week getting it all together and turned it on. It actually worked!  Yes, it took a bit to get the convergence where it should be but I was lucky - I worked to put myself through college in the mid - late 1950's by working as a repair tech in a small local TV sales/service facility. That was a blast, I remember when we got the first call to service a RCA color TV (CTS-100?) console set and didn't have the slightest idea what to do. As I remember, it had a horiz sync problem. So, we told the owner it couldn't be fixed in the house and we hauled it back to the shop. For the few weeks the two of us (our large service dept was a 70 year tech who understood AM table radios pretty well and me - a college kid who thought he knew everything) we learned how to converge a color TV set, and how it was similar to a B&W set in some areas and where it was different. After we got it nicely converged the boss would change a few adjustments and we went at it all over again. Actually, we got pretty good at doing convergence detail, those early sets, when properly converged in one location, would need a re-do if the owner moved it to a different wall in the same room, they were very sensitive to the direction of the earth's magnetic field. For a while we were the only techs in our area who had any experience at all with color TV and often other shops called us in when they had a color TV problem. Back to the main point though, I mounted the set sans cabinet (which cost extra) into a corner wall unit I built for it, and it was our only TV for the next ten years until we moved out into the country. During those ten years I don't ever remember having to touch the convergence, and I think I had to replace one or two tubes, but that was all.  It was a great set, with a picture as good as anything on the market - and better than some.

RIP, Heatkit!
De Don, W2DL (back then, W2HUX)

[AJ1G]

Actually, we got pretty good at doing convergence detail, those early sets, when properly converged in one location, would need a re-do if the owner moved it to a different wall in the same room, they were very sensitive to the direction of the earth's magnetic field.

Hmmm. You may have provided the answer why we had so much trouble keeping the Griefkit color TV (as it ended up being named by the guys who built it) at the frat properly converged.  The shelf that the chassis sat on on the other side of the wall from the chapter room was actually in a storage space/garage where the guys who had motorcycles would park them out of the weather and to protect them from being stolen.  The bikes were constantly being moved around in there, and could even be parked directly under the TV shelf.  There was also a weight bench with free weights in there close to the set!  WB2ZPS/1973 DE AJ1G/2013 - DUUHHHH!!!!

[VE3AJM]

As long as the gentleman maintains a lawful claim to it, the material likely won't be appearing publicly.

Whoever purchased from Heathkit the rights to their manuals may actually own much less than what he or she asserts to own. I suspect that a good deal of the boatanchor material was in the public domain long before the purchase.

Its good to see that there remain places to get copies of some of the Heathkit manual material that apparently are no longer copyright. For those of us who are simply looking for information on a piece of Heathkit equipment and get the old stuff working and on the air, this is great. Im glad that those sites are standing up for those of us who fall into this category, and not for the profiteers who see $$$ everywhere.

Al VE3AJM