Plumettaz

The Plumettaz group dates from 1923 and was originally located at Vevey on Lake Geneva. In 1930, seeing the toil of winegrowers on the terraced slopes of the region, the firm designed ploughs pulled not by hand but by portable overhanging capstan winches, and from that beginning it built a range of mechanical aids, capstan winches for snow groomers and facade maintenance, viticulture equipment and oil circulators for the railways, sold under the Plumett name. Since 1953 the design and supply of equipment for installing all-terrain cables for energy and telecommunications has been its core activity.

The company's Land Rover product was the Plumett Auto-Capstan Winch 'for various winching operations and for self-recovery', approved by the Rover Co. Ltd; the leaflet, received by the AA technical library in October 1964, names the manufacturer as Plumettaz Ltd, Bex, Switzerland, and the sole British distributors as Fuller, Lucas & Co. Ltd of Crowborough, Sussex. Driven from the centre power take-off and mounted between the front seats, it stored 750 ft of cable on a drum, gave a wide range of cable speeds, used capstan action so that pull and speed were independent of cable length, had a torque limiter for safety and an automatic winding system, and could pull in any direction relative to the vehicle while leaving the Land Rover free for other use; the photograph shows a Series II 109 station wagon equipped for electric line construction. Land Rover's own approved-equipment booklet (Pub. 658/E) listed it as a forestry winch of 3,500 lb pull with 750 ft of 5/16 in or 900 ft of 7 mm cable, mounted beside the driver on the gearbox and controlled through the gearbox ratios, clutch and accelerator, the cable leaving under the vehicle through a swinging guide pulley.

In 1987 Plumettaz patented its Jetting system, which pushes cables through ducts by air or water propulsion instead of pulling them, and it has since extended the technique to water-propelled floating installation for offshore wind connections, fibre-optic replacement and the Intellijet control software, claiming world leadership in the field with a range of some 3,500 machines. Plumettaz SA is headquartered at Route de la Gribannaz 7, 1880 Bex, with subsidiaries in Singapore and Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, and marked its hundredth anniversary in 2023.