Anyone Remember Building Kits

As a small boy I discovered the delights of taking things apart to figure out how they work. I would take apart anything and my father would bring home every broken appliance. I remember the best things to dissect had motors and gears! You could understand a gear reduction or a belt clutch by looking at them. By the time I reached ten I could repair small appliances; toasters, mixers, drills and sanders but radios were still beyond my ability. The workings of radio sets remained a mystery but I could take the tubes down to the drug store and test them. Most consumer radios in those days had less than a dozen tubes and most tubes failed due to an open heater or shorted grid. As a teenager too young for cars I became good at repairing radios. I actually could get most radios working by the time I was twelve. With these remove and replace skills, I did not understand how it worked but I could fix them by replacing parts! Sounds familiar doesn’t it. In today's world I could be the lead technician at my local new car dealership, sad but true! Remember this was in the 1950's so the electronics were all tubes and 200-400 Volts. I guess today this would be called child abuse but I never got shocked or hurt.

When I was old enough to drive I worked in a hardware store and became the appliance repairman. As a logical progression in my repair guy life I worked my way through college as a TV repairman. At this point I understood how radios worked, read schematics, could trace circuits and had my own tube tester. I replaced what seemed like a million GE tubes but likely it was 1000 each year. The shop was very large with 30 technicians; I worked mostly TV but also radios and small appliances as the backlog required. The manger was helpful letting me work only in the shop and odd hours around my class schedule. Looking back I now understand why the manager helped me out, I could work anywhere he needed help and I was cheap compared to the other technicians. I was happy to get what I considered a high paying job with something no one heard of in 1960, “flex” hours. I did go on to an engineer career working 30 years for a large aerospace company advancing to chief systems engineer. Being good at solving complex problems did help my career and caused me to be sent to projects in trouble in many different technologies and company divisions. These new challenges were very rewarding for me and gave me the opportunity to work in most disciplines of telecommunications.

As you may have gathered, I was a WWII baby boomer and grew up in the era of electronic kits once dominated by Heathkit. I always enjoyed building kits and I started looking at old catalogs on the internet. The following are my favorites I most remember over the many years;

Now, six decades later, the answers are easy to find on the Internet and I found many of the kits I made were actually Knight-Kits made by Allied Radio (now known as Allied Electronics). Knight-Kits, although not as extensive a line as Heathkit, had a full line of test equipment, SWL, audio and educational kits rounded out their product line. I guess I made more Knight-Kits because I was raised near Chicago and Allied Radio was a Chicago-based company I knew well many decades before they were purchased by Radio Shack. I did make a few EICO, PACO and other long-forgotten kits over years.

The following are the radios and kits, each marking a point in my life like your first BB gun, new bicycle or suit. I hope you enjoy looking back as much as I have enjoyed gathering these pictures.