Chuck Harris ) writes:
Steve wrote:

One thing I wonder was what happened when Heathkit unraveled? what
happened to the thousands of spare parts. Knowing how procurement
and inventory control works, I'm certain that they had hundreds of
SB, round and green, cabinets and thousands of green and black
knobs at the end.

Where did those parts go? I've seen rumors that someone or some
corporation bought up the parts inventory or that a rich ham has a
warehouse with several hundred unbuilt kits.

Did they take a tractor trailer to Dayton and liquidate the parts?
Was there ever a year that someone showed up with 40 SX-117's and
sold them for half price?


I suspect that the individual franchised Heathkit stores went to the
local hamfests and sold off the leftover inventory. At least that is
what happened in Maryland. First the local store offered reductions
on the kits in stock, and all of the demonstrator models that were
in the store, then after all the good stuff (read ham stuff) was gone,
they started showing up at the local hamfests with trailer loads of
heath trash. Weather stations, wiper delays, accessories, ...

All because Schlumberger had to get rid of the kit and computer division
to avoid an antitrust problem when they bought Fairchild.

-Chuck Harris

That sounds a bit garbled.

Wasn't Schlumberger out of the picture a lot earlier? Wasn't it Zenith
that bought Heath, in the late seventies or early eighties, leading to a
period when pre-assembled Heath computers were sold as Zenith's?

Heath "died" about a decade ago. That's relatively recent. Even then, it
continued/continues, though on a much smaller scale and not as a kit
manufacturer. They continued with the educational kits, or something like
that. And I thought they carried some inventory, at least for a few
years. Even a few years back, people were pointing people to Heath as
a source of spare parts in various newsgroups, I'm sure including this one.

And I think it was other issues that got Heath out of the kit business.
there was a period when they were selling to a wide range of the public.
I remember a John T. Frye article in Popular Electronics thirty years ago
where he wrote about the process of turning an item into a Heathkit, and
they used novices to test build using the instructions, to ensure that
anybody could build the kit. So the market was not just those interested
in electronics, but anyone who felt up to assemblying the kit, and wanted
to save some money.

With time, the kits got too complicated, because the level of electronics
had risen. And the savings to the builder were little or none. Solid
state brough a high level of mechanization in assemblying, something that
was not the case with tube equipment. One could probably cut some money
off a product if the end user put it together, even given the extra cost
of making it a kit. But that changed as the equipment became more
complicated, so you were either paying the same price for the kit
as an equivalent assembled unit, or even paying premium. That surely reduced
the average public's interest in such things, and it was that wider
swatch of the public that made the company profitable. When only hard
core hobbyists were interested in the kits, they could not sustain
the company.

And that surely is why it got out of the kit business.

Yes, there have risen various companies since then who put out kits.
But they are much smaller companies, deal with a specific market, and
likely deal with builders who expect less of a level of handholding.

Michael VE2BVW