Heathkit Educational Systems Closes Shop For Good 129
scharkalvin writes with this excerpt from the American Radio Relay League's site: "'For the second time since 1992, Heathkit Educational Services (HES) has shuttered its doors. Rumors of the legendary kit-building company's demise were posted on QRZ.com, with several readers bringing the news to the attention of the ARRL. In August 2011, Heathkit announced it was returning to the kit building business, and in September, that it would once again be manufacturing Amateur Radio kits. ... On LinkedIn, a popular networking site, HES Chief Executive Officer Lori Marciniak listed her employment ending at Heathkit as of March 2012. Likewise, Heathkit's Marketing and Sales Director Ernie Wake listed his employment ending in April 2012. An unsubstantiated report on Wikipedia states that "[in] December 2011, Heathkit Educational Systems laid off most employees and in March 2012, the company indefinitely suspended operations."' It looks like Heathkit is gone for good. Their plans on re-entering the kit market died with the current economy."
There are other kit makers out there (Score:5, Informative)
Check out Ramsey Electronics sometime. I have build several of there kits with my kids. My only gripe with them is that they do not offer the source code for any of there microcontroller-based projects, and seemed to get offended when I asked.
Re:They killed themselves (Score:2, Informative)
Heathkit Educational Systems has been quite profitable since the discontinuance of the kits. The school market was huge, they (we) made a ton of money selling electronics training courseware, and computer repair courseware to thousands of tech schools and colleges. ITT Tech was a big customer. It's a long list of technical topics, some more profitable than others. I visited hundreds of them over the years, around the globe.
FWIW your theory disassembling the company isn't correct. The money went away a long time ago through several ownership changes. Recently a combination of shriveled school budgets and the inability to develop new markets or products ended the run.
different filter caps, please (Score:5, Informative)
the wax-ender filter caps used on countless scopes out of Heath were not reliable and shorted a lot. replace with epoxy-fill from some source like CDE, and as long as you didn't kill the transformer, you should have it fixed for good.
if you did kill the transformer, flip some filament transformer insulated to 1500 or 2500 volts backwards, feed from the AC line, and that will suffice.