Can we improve the quality of our work? andysylvester.com
@AndySylvester Excellent posting, Andy. I've been thinking about Heathkits now for quite some time. I grew up on them in ham radio and Steve Jobs was introduced to them at a very young ago also. Heath had a policy, clearly stated on all their manuals, which was "We won't let you fail." Build the kit and if it didn't work, send it to them and they'd fix it for a nominal fee. I never knew anyone who had to take them up on it. They always worked for me.
@Ron I built a Heathkit digital clock last year and it didn't work quite right when i finished. They had me ship it in and they found the problem and fixed it (for a small fee). It was a lot of fun.
@jack Very cool. I'm glad they still have the same policy. There's a ham in Israel who does a podcast where he interviews a lot of the ham oldtimers and he always asks them about their early rigs and a high percentage of them talk about their beloved Heathkits. Heath set the gold standard for instruction manuals for a long time. Now there's another company in the same class (Elecraft). Andy was talking about using checklists to maintain high quality and that's how the Heathkit manuals were organized.