Aeroparts Engineering

Aeroparts Engineering Company Limited was incorporated on 23 April 1937. By 1954 its head office was at Commercial Road, Hereford, with C. H. Shelton as managing director and H. K. Pierson as chairman, and its trade was airframe assemblies and components, engine components, lubrication equipment and toolmaking; the Westland Motor Co. of the same address, a vehicle bodybuilder, was an associated company. The firm became a public company in 1956 and in 1961 described itself as engineers and sub-contractors to the aircraft, motor and allied industries with 200 employees. A local sports-club history remembers the factory as formed in 1946 at the bottom of Commercial Road, on what is now the site of a Morrisons supermarket.

After the war Aeroparts, like Rover, had to find new markets, and it became the Land Rover's winch maker. The first production Aeroparts capstan winch was rear-mounted, available from 1949 at £20 on top of the £25 rear power take-off it bolted to; it was discontinued in May 1955 after structural failures when the pull was not in line with the vehicle. The more familiar front-mounted capstan, driven from the crankshaft, arrived in August 1950 at £35. Winches were stamped AEH, for Aeroparts Engineering Hereford: the AEH.V of 1950-56 with four drain grooves round the bollard lip, the AEH.D from about 1956 with a shallower baseplate to clear the 2-litre diesel, and around 15,000 of the two were made between 1950 and 1971. Line pull was raised to 3,000 lb in the late 1960s. A small-bollard winch introduced in November 1971 replaced the mills pin with a brass shear pin designed to fail at 3,000 lb; folded-steel fairleads replaced the aluminium castings in 1973; and the last variant, known by its Unipart number GLR101 and costing £126.60, appeared in 1976 with a green information plate instead of a stamped serial. A tall-bollard version was built for the General Post Office and British Telecom for pulling cable below ground, and Aeroparts also made the GLR104 hydraulic drum winch, converted for the GPO into a capstan.

By the late 1960s Aeroparts belonged to the RTZ-Pillar group and was later owned by the mining group Rio Tinto. In 1987 it was acquired by Peak Engineering Co. of Stratford-on-Avon, a fellow RTZ subsidiary; the Land Rover enthusiast account gives the merger as 1986 and adds that competition from Fairey ended the Aeroparts winch line. The registered company was renamed Caradon Building Products Limited on 24 June 1998 and dissolved on 4 April 2012.