Labor ended Heathkit long before March 1992, when the Heath Company closed out its last kits. By the end of the 1970s, assembly labor was only 4 or 5 percent of what electronics cost to build, so a kit had almost nothing left to save you.

For 45 years, Heath sold kits from a free catalog mailed out of Benton Harbor, Michigan, and from more than fifty Heathkit Electronic Centers. In 1979 the catalog offered nearly 400 kits, and a Heathkit cost about 30 percent less than a comparable assembled product. Then Zenith bought Heath for its computer unit, and the stores and engineers moved toward computers.

In this documentary:
• Why did the Heathkit discount disappear?
• What did the empty check boxes in every assembly manual do for a builder?
• How did Zenith's computer business change the Heathkit stores?
• Why did the 1990 catalog open with motion lights instead of kits?
• What happened to Heath after the kits ended?

If you ever put the last pencil check in a Heathkit manual and switched on something you built, tell us what it was in the comments. What remains are the manuals, the scanned catalogs and a great deal of equipment that still works.

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Sources:
Plug Is Pulled on Heathkits, Ending a Do-It-Yourself Era - The New York Times, Lawrence M. Fisher, 1992: https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/30/busines...
The Rise and Fall of Heathkit, Part 4, interview with former Heath VP Chas Gilmore - EEJournal, Steven Leibson, 2024: https://www.eejournal.com/article/the-rise...
Heathkit Catalog 848, Winter 1980 - Heath Company, 1980: https://archive.org/details/1980-heathkit-...
Zenith To Sell PC Subsidiary - The New York Times, Steven Greenhouse, 1989: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/03/busines...

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Disclaimer: The voiceover used in this video was generated using AI.