HEATHkit cult

[Max Pierson]

Their designs were not that great sometimes. I had one of the Ham
Transceivers and they seriesed two caps for high voltage filtering without
any equalizing resistors. Classic mistake, the voltage equalizes according
to the leakage of the caps and eventually they went out of balance and one
blew up, smoked up my apartment real bad.

Max

>From: "Zuckier, Gerald" <ZuckierG at AETNA.COM>
>Reply-To: "Zuckier, Gerald" <ZuckierG at AETNA.COM>
>To: HEATH at LISTSERV.TEMPE.GOV
>Subject: Re: HEATHkit cult
>Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 15:21:17 -0400
>
>I don't know about everybody else, but my impression of Heath parts
>quality is not great. I remember putting together one of their
>automotive ignition analyzers for the high school auto shop; had 3
>rectifier diodes in the power supply, and one of them looked like the
>band was on the wrong end of the bullet shape. Took out the ohmmeter and
>it was. So I checked the remaining two; one was correct, and the third
>one was open circuit in both directions.
>
>Flash forward many years to me trying to figure out why my Heathkit TV
>was staticy. While fooling around with the tuner sections, just happen
>to brush the carbon varistor used to protect from turn on surge.
>Immediate static. Home in on this little baby; it was one of the ones
>that look like a pencil lead with a crimped on cap on each end; the
>crimped on cap on one end was intermittent. Replaced it with a Radio
>Shack item. You know parts quality is not good when the Radio Shack
>parts are superior.
>
>This would not fly with the current amateur audio crowd.
>Which reminds me: build-it-yourself types ought to check out
>http://www.audioXpress.com. They currently put out two quarterly mags,
>one for speaker builders and one for generic audio amateur building,
>condensed from their former separate mags for tube-type audio, amateur
>audio, etc. Also run a little mail order parts service.
>
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