W&E Platt

W&E Platt was incorporated in 1980 and describes itself as a family-owned specialist in the design, manufacture, installation and integrated logistic support of weapon mounts for military vehicles and naval vessels, working from 10 Stennett Road, Ingleburn, in south-western Sydney. The export story traces back some twenty-five years before 2013, when the father of the present director, Allan Platt, was asked to repair the Royal Australian Navy's .50 calibre machine-gun mounts; the Special Air Service Regiment then asked for a new .50 calibre mounting design.

That design became the Land Rover fit. Platt's FW700 open ring mount first entered Australian service in 1997-98 on the SASR's 6x6 Land Rover Long Range Patrol Vehicles, the Perentie-based patrol cars that had entered service in the early 1990s and deployed from 1998; the Australian War Memorial's Surveillance Reconnaissance Vehicle of the 2nd Commando Regiment, built under Project Bushranger and used in Afghanistan from October 2008 to November 2009, carries a Platt ring mount for the .50 calibre M2HB-QCB or the Mk 19 automatic grenade launcher on a tubular roll-over structure above the cargo bay. Platt's swing mounts, in double-swing-arm (15-20 kg) and single-swing-arm (8.5 kg) forms, take the MAG 58/M240, Minimi/M249, PKM, M60 and MG3 with 200 rounds on the mount and a 360-degree traverse, and were proven by coalition forces in the Middle East; swing mounts went onto the ASLAV in 1998 and the Bushmaster some years later, where the MR660 Mod 1 equips more than 850 vehicles.

The company has been a trusted international supplier since 1997 and its ISO 9001:2015-certified works exports to more than forty countries, among them the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and Finland; the UAE became the fifteenth export customer in January 2013 with an order for more than fifty MR550 manually operated ring mounts, Canada launched the electrically driven eDrive ring mount on its Cougars, and by 2013 more than 20,000 Platt mountings were in service across sixteen nations on a turnover above $20 million with a workforce of around thirty. W & E Platt Pty Ltd, ACN 127 236 266, remains active and privately held.