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diyAudio Member
Join Date: Sep 2001
Location: Melbourne, Australia
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The kit business is tough. Numbers are small, service is email based and can be very lengthy and expensive, and expectations are high. Occasionally the customer is very inexperienced and the education process this involves completely blows any profit margin out the window. You'd only do it because you love DIY, and/or enjoy pain.
It is rare indeed for someone with technical prowess to have comprehensive skills in documentation. As someone here mentioned, documentation is an ongoing process, as it must accommodate changing parts lists, enhancements, and known misinterpretations. The documentation for my 55W amp runs to 14,900 words, some 38 diagrams and pictures - and took about two months to write. The 100W amp is more again, and the hybrid preamplifier even larger.
I believe that if you do something well enough, you will satisfy your customers and win sales. Eventually you will make a profit. But most DIYers are not well informed about the market; they believe it will be cheaper. No, it will not be cheaper; the cheapest option is to buy used. But you learn nothing and have little pride of ownership. If you make it yourself, you learn a great deal, and if the documentation is well composed you learn in a fun way, with minimum discomfort. If the product is appropriately priced to cover service charges, you can guide the beginner through with minimum fuss and minimal financial loss. If, moreover, the design is good, then the pride of ownership is deeply satisfying all round. This is the goal, of course........
There are two weak points in most kits I have seen. The obvious one is the documentation, but the other weakness is the design. It is rare to find a DIY design which is really, really good, because the R&D is horrifically expensive. Perhaps a third point I'd make concerns culture; Northern Europeans, Central Europeans, Brits and Americans are all different in their interpretation of directions. Thus they must be written with cultural variation in mind, and this is not easy. Ambiguity and misinterpretation must be avoided, and in this area photographs and diagrams are king.
Someone mentioned transformers. Where bipolar power supplies are required - that is, direct coupled PP SS amplifiers - it is very easy to get it wrong, as the color code for transformer manufacturers is NOT standardised. I include a stepped instruction on how to figure out the secondaries regardless of the color coding, so that this problem is explained. I also put in a disclaimer so that if you make a mistake, and have not consulted a qualified and certified electrician, neither I nor my company has any liability, but in general there are seldom problems.
In closing, I would say categorically that if you are a complete newbie and have neither soldering skills nor any understanding of electricity, you should not be wiring up mains transformers or even building mains powered audio kits. This narrows my market, but it does discourage the uninitiated who might be a danger to themselves if they attempted some pretty forbidding mains wiring. I have found that the most uneconomic customer of all is the nice guy without a clue, who requires 40-50 emails of education to get through it all.
Cheers,
Hugh
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In some states (i.e. Queensland) the laws have recently changed where even being a electronic repairer has become difficult because of the perceived problem of people electrocuting themselves.
