Rheingold Heavy was founded in June, 2014 by Daniel Hienzsch. It is focused on delivering educational content, materials, circuit boards, tools, workshops and generally awesome electronics stuff to the Maker community, electronics enthusiasts and students. The Rheingold Heavy Lab was founded in the heart of Hollywood, CA. That doesn’t really mean anything, but it sounds cool.
Founder: Daniel Hienzsch
Daniel Hienzsch is the founder of Rheingold Heavy. He worked in IT for 20 years, including spending 10 years as the IT Director for an investment bank. Before his first job answering phones on a helpdesk, Dan drove a forklift for a living. If you’ve never driven a forklift, you should give it a try.
Dan is passionate about education, and works every day to build a company that is dedicated to demystifying technology and teaching you how to measure the world around you. Rheingold Heavy is Dan’s effort to provide the community materials he wished he had when he was first getting started in electronics and technology.
In addition to running Rheingold Heavy, Dan is also a certified scuba instructor because breathing underwater seemed like a reasonable idea at the time.
Head of Engineering: Daniel Hienzsch
Daniel Hienzsch is the Head of Engineering at Rheingold Heavy. All the products and content you see is designed, tested and produced by him. Dan has been involved in technological education dating back to teaching Commodore64 BASIC programming to people much older than him when he was in the sixth grade. In the course of working with electronics, he has lugged around a parts bin full of passives to every place he’s live in for the last 15 years. He doesn’t use those parts on the products you buy.
Dan has dropped so many 0805 capacitors while building product in the lab, that he has raised the passive capacitance of the office at least a full Farad. Fortunately he drops just as many resistors so the floor can’t discharge easily.
Head of Customer Service And Fulfillment: Daniel Hienzsch
Daniel Hienzsch is in charge of all customer service and shipping at Rheingold Heavy, from managing the shipping to answering the phones. Dan’s first real job was running the warehouse for a company that sold massive electric motors, worm gear drives and other remarkably astounding industrial stuff.
Dan’s knowledge of the product lines was so encyclopedic, he still remembers the internal part number for a 35HP Toshiba EQP III TEFC Electric Motor swapped out to an F2 assembly, 056360, even though the company doesn’t exist anymore.
He has great stories about UPS drivers and he once swapped out the engine in his 1973 Super Beetle in the warehouse by using the forklift to raise the car off the engine.
Actually, he did that last thing twice.
Head of Technical Support: Daniel Hienzsch
Daniel Hienzsch is in charge of all technical support at Rheingold Heavy, so if you have a problem with anything you’ve received, or discover a typo or technical mistake in the content, let him know immediately! Dan’s first job in technology was answering phones for a Federal government help desk in San Francisco. He did it so poorly he was yelled at his first week for reading the help file to Microsoft Word v6.0. Eventually he moved up the ladder to field stripping 386s and getting his fingers pincushioned by the solder points on the backs of token ring network cards.
In Silicon Valley in the early 2000s, Dan was in charge of a lab focused on R&D in Information Technology support systems, where he got to work with a lot of very cool companies with hockey stick profit projections that didn’t live past late 2001. Coincidentally, Dan also didn’t make it past 2002, because he got laid off by the company when it realized it couldn’t afford a lab focused on R&D in Information Technology support systems.
Actually, he did that last thing twice.