Rolba

Rolba Aktiengesellschaft was founded on 13 October 1949 and entered in the commercial register at Wetzikon, in the canton of Zürich, on 20 October 1949, with a second plant at Dietikon. It made municipal machinery — snow blowers for road and rail, street sweepers, gritting equipment and slope vehicles — and between 1960 and 1965 bought the factory site at Zürcherstrasse 51-73 in Wetzikon to meet demand, developing there the world's first rotary snow blower to be fitted in series production with a stepless hydrostatic travel drive. In the 1970s Rolba took on the assembly and sale of Ratrac piste machines, was among the leading makers of snowploughs, building the world's largest, and in 1978 won the biggest export order ever placed for snow-clearing machines, 200 units for Turkey.

Its British company, Rolba Limited, was incorporated on 2 September 1960 and traded from 88/92 Rochester Row, Victoria, London SW1 (telephone Victoria 4980, telegrams 'Snowboy, London'). Its Land Rover conversion was the 'Rolba rotary snowplough with hydrostatic transmission', on an eight-page Series II brochure of November 1962 and a four-page Rover-approved leaflet numbered 7300/6/63 of June 1963. The plough, carried on standard Land Rover wheels with 6.00 x 16 tyres and towed on a two-inch ball coupling with stabiliser bars, cleared a swath 6 ft 7 in wide and up to 3 ft deep at 300 tons an hour, throwing snow 27 to 30 ft through two swivelling nozzles from a pair of 2 ft 9 in cutting rotors at about 100 rpm with 'Snow-Boy' Mod. 2005 knives and two 20-inch ejector turbines at 400 rpm; it weighed about a ton and was raised, lowered and turned by three hydraulic rams. The Land Rover was an 88-inch petrol model with heavy-duty suspension, oil cooler, engine governor set at 3,600 rpm, truck cab and bonnet-mounted spare, converted with a hydrostatic drive — a Lucas IP 500 variable-delivery pump, a Dowty booster pump and a Hydrostatic Transmissions Ltd M.1875/C five-cylinder radial motor — giving three infinitely variable ranges from 0-1 to 0-7½ mph for ploughing while keeping the normal 70 mph on the road. A second steering wheel on the back of the cab, chain-and-sprocket-driven to the main column, let the operator drive in reverse from a swivelling seat, with the standard fuel tank replaced by two 20-gallon tanks under the wheelboxes, a single-pane Triplex rear window with twin wipers, auxiliary lights on the cab roof and RUD snow chains among the extras. Complete, the outfit was about 19 ft long and weighed about 2½ tons.

In 1990 Rolba took over Konrad Peter AG of Liestal and ran into serious financial difficulty, undergoing a debt restructuring; in 1991 it was acquired by the Bucher Guyer group's Kuhn subsidiary, and the business was continued by a newly founded Rolba Kommunaltechnik AG, which was merged into its parent Bucher Guyer in 1994. The airport-equipment and snow-blower divisions were bought in 2010 by Zaugg AG of Eggiwil, which continues to sell Rolba 500, 1500 and 3000 snow blowers under the name. Rolba Limited in London was renamed Airport & Road Equipment Limited on 9 March 1993 and, as Sojo International Partners Limited since 2014, still exists as a company in Kent.