Towards the end of my interview with Chas Gilmore – formerly the VP of product development, marketing, and sales at the Heath Company – I realized we had not touched on a couple of questions I’d sent to him in preparation for our Zoom call in October: whether any particular Heathkits stood out in his mind, and if he remembered the Heathkit Microwave Oven kit I’d built in the early 1970s. Here are his final recollections from the interview.
Chas Gilmore: You asked if any other particularly ambitious kits come to mind. Two of them. One, we’ve described. That computer line was one hell of an ambitious project.
Steve Leibson: Right.
Chas Gilmore: The other one, much earlier in the early seventies, was the GR-2000, a 25-inch color TV. And it was the first television anywhere that had on-screen channel and time. And it was a kit. I think one year we sold 47,000 of them.
Steve Leibson: Wow!
Chas Gilmore: Yeah. That was like crazy for a kit.
The Heathkit GR-2000 25-inch color television receiver was the first in the world to offer on-screen channel and time indicators generated by internal digital circuitry. Heath sold several styles of wood cabinets and consoles for the completed GR-2000 televisions because back then, televisions were both technological products and furniture. Image credit: Heath Company
Steve Leibson: So how does a company like Heathkit go and get a CRT, a color CRT?
Chas Gilmore: Well, we probably had a 15-person purchasing department, and, I mean, we bought a lot of product, especially considering the fact that, you know, in terms of our cost of goods sold. The raw cost of goods sold was probably 50%. So, when we were $70 million, we were buying $35 million worth of parts, and there were plenty of CRT manufacturers to sell us CRTs. Most kits were probably more like 10,000 a year or something. But you know, RCA, Sylvania, quite a number of others, were quite willing to sell us CRTs and other components for our kits. But the thing I was aiming on by bringing up the GR-2000 was phenomenal innovation. Fact is, we had, I think, when Zenith acquired us, 27 patents on improvements to color televisions.
Zenith, interestingly enough, was a very, very patent-oriented company. There was one guy there who had between 400 and 500 patents. They had big patent ceremonies every year for all the engineers who had gotten a patent. They were quite interested. But Heath was doing very innovative work to build a color television at home and get it completely aligned using parts of it, you know, just taking a section of the TV and converting it into a color bar dot generator, and then converting it back to part of the operating TV. There was some pretty ingenious engineering.
Steve Leibson: Yeah.
Chas Gilmore: And, as you probably know from your years of engineering, building a low-cost product, which a lot of Heathkits were, takes talent.
Steve Leibson: Right.
Chas Gilmore: As I remember the guy, the VP of engineering at LumenX, when I first was there, I was talking with him, and he was one of the ones who said, “Hey, you give me enough time and money, and I’ll build you anything.” Well, yes, no. The answer is, “I want it below everybody else’s cost and I want it faster. And, by the way, you gotta be able to build it at home with a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, and a soldering iron.”
Steve Leibson: Right. So, I guess that leads me to the kit that I’m very familiar with, which is the microwave oven. Who came up with that? That’s just like out of the blue.
Chas Gilmore: Yes, and no, it wasn’t when you consider where we were. We were in Saint Joe, Michigan. By then the company had moved. Benton Harbor, Michigan, was the home of a company called Whirlpool, and Whirlpool had a microwave oven. The product line manager for General Products got hold of the product manager at Whirlpool, and said, “Hey, we’d like to make a kit out of your microwave oven.” The Whirlpool manager said, “Well, I guess we could consider that,” and sure enough, we made a kit out of that microwave oven. There were a few things that were modified, etc. But it was fundamentally a Whirlpool design. Now the other piece of it is, there isn’t anything about a microwave oven that’s very exotic from an electronics standpoint.
The Heathkit Microwave Oven was a kit version and cosmetic reworking of a Whirlpool microwave oven. Whirlpool’s headquarters were located very close to the Heath Company’s headquarters, so the companies interacted. Image credit: Heath Company
Steve Leibson: Right. It’s mostly a mechanical assembly.
Chas Gilmore: Yes, a big mechanical assembly, but that means it lends itself very nicely to being a kit. And then there were a few things that they were learning. I remember bringing home a prototype [of the microwave oven] and sticking it in our kitchen. My memory is that Polly had gotten the roast out of the freezer and put it in there, and something on the [oven door] interlock failed, and the roast is inside that damn microwave oven. We weren’t getting it out, or she wasn’t, until I came home and disassembled the oven. Then there were some things with burned bread, and it had some interesting twists to it.
Steve Leibson: Well, my own experience was, I built this oven for my mother, and then I went off to school, and it died. I was able to troubleshoot it over the phone and I decided that it had lost a high voltage diode. So, I ordered the diode for her. She wasn’t technical at all.
Chas Gilmore: Yeah.
Steve Leibson: And she opened up the Heathkit manual, and I was able to help her through disassembling the oven, uncoupling the old diode, plugging in the new one, putting it back together, and it worked.
Chas Gilmore: And, you know, one of the things that Heath learned as we began to be more scientific about the marketing and understanding who the customers were, etc, was that as the customer built this kit, you were building up to a big high if they turned it on, and it worked. But then we learned if they turned it on and it didn’t work, of course, the customer’s emotions went down for a bit. But then, when they solved the problem, the high was even bigger than having the completed product work with no troubleshooting.
Steve Leibson: Right, because they learn troubleshooting, and I’ll tell you, I generally made exactly one mistake in every Heathkit that I built, and so I had to troubleshoot every single one of them.
Chas Gilmore: And you wound up with a bigger high. And what that meant is that you weren’t a one-time customer. Our regular customers usually owned about five kits.
Steve Leibson: Yeah. Well, I think I tripled that number easily.
Chas Gilmore: Well, over the years. I figure I built about 150 of them.
Steve Leibson: Yeah, you were in a special position.
Chas Gilmore: Yes, well, absolutely, because one of the neat things was that we had this process, and I think we pretty well discussed it in the article with Lou. But we had a proof-build process to build to check the manual out, and two of the people that were always on the proof-build list were the engineering section manager for that product and the product line manager. And, of course, I filled both positions at various times, so I built a lot of Heathkits, and I still have probably half a dozen which I never got around to building, because by the time I got into an executive position, you were able to draw from inventory, because if the managers in the company were building, they were involved right?
So that turned out to be a pretty damn good program and a very interesting company.
Steve Leibson: Yes. One of a kind.
Chas Gilmore: One of a kind. Heath actually had a pretty good run. And, basically, the kit business went from 1947 to 1992, and I worked, as I said, twenty some odd years there. It was like working in a candy factory. My love had always been instrumentation and measurement. I grew into that as a kid in high school. I’d much rather build a transmitter and start measuring SWR and antennas and doing all kinds of stuff other than getting on the air and talking to people.
Basically, for all of my career, I’ve been involved in instrumentation of one kind or another. So by the time I got to be the director of engineering for the Technical Products position, I had the Ham radio department, and I was a very avid ham. Again, I enjoyed the technical side of hamming.
I had both instrumentation departments and, I mean, I just actually…
Steve Leibson: I understand. I understand.
Chas Gilmore: It was wonderful.
Although the original Heath Company that offered electronic kits ceased to offer the kits in 1992, the Heath Company has been reconstituted and offers a few new kits plus assemblies and a few other accessory kits designed to augment older Heathkits from the company’s heyday. The company’s Website carries this message:
“Heathkit’s destiny is in new hands, under new management and ownership. We know the value and trust you place in the Heathkit name, and we are committed to making Heathkit succeed and flourish.
“… As devoted Heathkit fans know, the parent company name and the ownership of Heathkit have changed a number of times in the roughly 120 or so years since Ed Heath founded the business. Over the decades Heathkit has been a subsidiary of Daystrom, Schlumberger, and Zenith and has been independent several times. Really: Unless you’re an industry historian, it doesn’t matter. Here’s the bottom line: Heath Company runs all Heathkit operations today. High-quality kits, educational systems and instructional products always have been a major line of Heathkit’s business, and we remain committed to education and the joy of building and learning as an important Heathkit value and contribution.”
Click here for more info.
My Heathkit story: During the 1960s and 1970s, I built several pieces of Heathkit gear including a tube-based oscilloscope with recurrent sweep, transistorized oscilloscope with triggered sweep, FETVOM, portable utility VOM, transistor tester, low-voltage dc power supply, audio sine-square signal generator, RF signal generator, microwave oven, stereo receiver, and a futuristic digital clock with those beautiful orange Panaplex 7-segment displays. These kits helped shape my subsequent career as a design engineer. Twenty years later, just before Heath discontinued its line of kits in the early 1990s, I built one final Heathkit with my young daughter: a dragonfly that flapped its wings with a battery-powered piezoelectric motor.
Do you have Heathkit memories to share? Please post them below in the comments.
