Alfred Bullows & Sons

A. Bullows and Sons of Long Street, Walsall, was advertising as a malleable iron foundry in 1896-97; its founding date has not been established. By 1953 Alfred Bullows & Sons were listed as manufacturers of air compressors and garage equipment, and in the late 1950s they were suppliers of paint-spraying equipment, offering the Hydrovane compressor in 1957-59, a truck-mounted 'Hydra-Spray' set and a water-wash paint spray booth in 1959.

The firm's compressor was one of the very first conversions offered for the Land Rover. A Rover Company leaflet of 1949, 'The Land Rover with the Bullows Air Compressor — carries compressor and crew!', which the brochure archive describes as, with the Tickford station wagon, the mobile welder and the fire engine, one of the earliest conversions Land Rover ever offered, was issued by the Rover Company Limited of Solihull with the price on application and delivery ex works. The Bullows 2A5000 was a three-cylinder 120-degree broad-arrow air-cooled compressor with two low-pressure cylinders of 4½ in bore and a high-pressure cylinder of 3⅜ in, all of 3 in stroke, with inter- and after-coolers, automatic unloading gear and intake filters, displacing 72 cubic feet a minute for 60 cubic feet of free air at 1,300 rpm and 100 psi on about six pints of fuel an hour. It was bolted on a fabricated steel bedplate to the chassis frame of a standard 80-inch Land Rover equipped with the engine governor and centre power take-off, driven at governed speed by three vee-belts from the PTO at the gearbox, with the air receiver mounted above the high-pressure cylinder, a pneumatic control unit in the governor linkage to slow the engine off load, and a pressure gauge on the dash; for hot climates an engine oil cooler was fitted.

Ten years later Bullows sold its own Land Rover fitting, the 'Bullows R4504 Hydrovane Compressor', on a leaflet 'as approved by the Rover Co. Ltd for use with the Land-Rover' received by the Automobile Association's technical library on 2 March 1959. The Hydrovane was a single-stage rotary machine free of pumps and valves, rated at 60 cubic feet a minute free air delivered at 100 psi and 2,400 rpm continuously, or 75 cfm at 3,000 rpm intermittently, with a servo valve that held the pressure drop between no flow and full flow to 2-3 psi and so did away with the air receiver. It came as a complete assembly that could be fitted to any Land Rover in a few minutes: the mounting frame was a dummy tailboard replacing the standard one, and drive was by vee-belt from the standard rear power take-off, with a speed control in the engine linkage worked from the compressor control gear. The leaflet gave Alfred Bullows & Sons Ltd's head office and works as Long Street, Walsall, Staffordshire, telephone Walsall 5401, with depots at 13 South Molton Street, London W1, 70 Gilmour Street, Glasgow, and 55A/57 Bridge Street, Manchester.

Binks acquired Bullows in 1967, and the business continued as Binks-Bullows Ltd, recorded at Brownhills, Walsall, in 1983 as distributors of GEC robot systems for the paint industry. Binks-Bullows Hydrovane compressors of the 1960s, such as the PR303E, survive in numbers as vintage workshop equipment.