About Us

The company was founded on October the 1st 1986 by Peter Hewitt and his wife Joan Hewitt from their home in Leeds

Peters background was as a mechanical fitter originally as an apprentice from the George Cohen and Sons factory in Leeds and latterly from the Leeds fireclay before he joined WG Search as a compressed air fitter.

He worked his way up to works manager at WG Search before leaving to join DMF compressors in Wakefield, they were looking for someone who specifically knew the old fashioned by this time Broom and Wade piston compressors.

After a few years Peter decided to be his own boss  & and started Dax Air with the full blessing from his peers & specifically Dave Martin, owner of DMF

He borrowed £1000 from his father-in-law and bought a van with the sole intention of taking on enough small customers to pay a wage and keep it a simple entity,

but things rapidly changed…..

During his last week of employment he was doing  a handover to the engineering manager at Greggs Glass to introduce the new compressor engineer who would be taking over.

John Dixon the Engineering Manager was nervous about the change, since Peter had taken over the maintenance of their 6 250hp Broom and Wade compressors they had zero downtime due to failures.

After discussion with all parties involved it was agreed as a best solution for the customer Peter to continue the contract and was passed to Dax Air.

This posed an issue to Dax Air, the fledgling business was too small to hold the spares needed for such large compressors, so as was the relationship with Greggs Glass they paid up front for 2 years worth of service and overhaul spares to keep in their stores and when used Dax Air could invoice  them for replacements as they grew. This was a massive boost to a growing company.

On 25/7/87 Neil Hewitt, Peters son and our current Managing Director, went to Greggs Glass with Peter on his 15th birthday and they started the 2 week process of completely stripping down one of the large compressors for a full overhaul, 

this started Neils love of the compressed air industry and 37 years later despite being the MD he is still out in the field most days with a spanner in his hands.

In December 87 Joans brother Alan Townsend joined the business, Alan was the charge hand on the plant side at WG Search and soon picked up the compressed air world.

In July 1988 Neil left school and joined the business full time but spent the 1st year at the EITB training center whilst Peter and Alan spent most of that year in Scotland contracting for Steadvale Air systems, their reputation taking them countrywide

1989 was when Dax Air started to get traction, 

A contract was won to refurbish multiple old Broom Wade V compressors for a company in Doncaster who were putting them in storage containers and shipping them out to mines in Africa, 

Further contracts was also won to refurbish Atlas Copco DT4 compressors for the UK mining industry. 

All this while the core Greggs Glass work was carrying on.

Fast forward to 1996, 

Dax Air were approached by Tony Greaves who worked for Yorkshire Water, 

Tony new Peter from a past life where he worked in the compressor industry and he was now in a management position at Yorkshire Water and had issues with some blowers on one of his sites.

Needless to say, Dax Air sorted out those issues and started doing ad hoc reactive work for YW in the Leeds area 

Our name & reputation spread from manager to manager and we started taking on reactive work and the odd bit of planned maintenance right across the entire network of Yorkshire Water.

In early 2000 Greggs Glass were looking to upgrade their old compressors to newer more energy efficient machines, in our now honest style we sat down over a cup of tea and decided this wasn’t our most competitive area at the time, so we introduced them to another distributor who replaced most of the old kit, 

We knew it was a large amount of work for us to lose but we had other areas now growing & we always look to work to our strengths

Fast forward to 2006, There were still only the 4 people in the business as Peter never wanted to expand and him and Joan were looking to retire in the October of that year with the plan being that Neil and Alan would take over with a friend of Neils, Paul Shortreed, coming in to take over the office work.

Unfortunately Peter passed away suddenly in May 2006 so plans had to change quickly, 

1 week later Alan was out on site and Paul arrived at the office at 0745 to start work to be greeted by Neil who said “here is the phone, here is the job book, this is the computer password, my mum will be up at 10 ish but will be no use from a work point of view, please look after her as best you can, I have to run we have a priority zero in from Yorkshire Water, do the best you can and I will get back as soon as I can”

We muddled through for the next few months, Neil and Alan had to learn how to run a business with no planned handover or support. Whilst with Joan grieving the sudden loss

Fortunately, Peter was well known and liked withing our industry and people like Simon Biggs the MD of Norman Walkers and Ian Harrison the General Manager at PPS offering advice, support for  this young team of business owners

In July 2006 we were starting to find our feet & the business was running well day to day, along came another call from Tony Greaves at Yorkshire Water, 

He had been tasked with setting up full preventative maintenance plans for all of YW’s compressors and blowers.

A few meetings were had, and this maintenance program started in 2007 where Dax Air became the primary maintenance supplier for all things air related.

In 2009 Dax Air took on its first proper apprentice, Zak Shortreed, this was because he did his school work experience working with Neil in 2008 and impressed him to the point of a job offer when he left school, Zak is still with the business to this day as a senior service engineer.

In 2010 Ian Stalker joined us, he was Ex RAF and since leaving the forces had worked for a couple compressor companies before starting his own business in 2008, his business was his buy in to Dax Air and he brought with him lots of experience on the modern compressors that Dax Air didn’t have and he was tasked with developing the industrial side of the business whilst Neil Hewitt concentrated on the utility side.

In 2010 with a need to expand our industrial service sector Paul Chapman joined us who is also still with us as a senior service engineer.

In 2011 Dax Air took on a distribution for Hydrovane Compressors followed by ABAC and Worthington in 2012 and Elmo Rietschle in 2014.

In 2019 We acquired the services of a very knowledgeable chap from the Vacuum industry called Neil Patterson who took on the role of Rietschle guru and service manager.

In 2023 Ian Stalker retired and Paul Thomas joined us and took on the position of General manager.

Dax Air has grown to currently employing 12 people, a proactive apprenticeship program 

2024 Sees a large investment in to our facilities & growing our team. Which you can follow on our media platforms !