About

  I’ve always had a passion for aviation and metalwork and from 2008 I combined the two when I started Aeroart. 

   It all began with a strong desire to have my very own genuine aircraft propeller which I could polish up and display at home, I knew the basics in the art of metal finishing so how hard could it be??

    After about six months I was lucky enough to acquire a 2-bladed fixed pitch McCauley propeller which I stripped, wet sanded and polished entirely by hand. Looking back now I realise how naive I was to consider such a task without any power tools but I’ve polished small motorcycle parts as a young boy and so I just adopted the same method but on a much bigger scale. After about 40 hours of blood, sweat and a few tears I was finally finished (and so was most of my body and mind!) I had the ultimate display piece though and I was the envy of all my friends....

    Roll on another two years and I had spent months of my life just searching for more propellers and teaching myself how to get a perfect and flawless mirror finish on aluminium. I now had a small workshop at home and a collection of very rare propellers from the 1920s onwards which I was building on. I was also now using power tools but still doing it all by hand, the only way of doing this kind of work is the long slow way and sadly there aren’t too many shortcuts. Anyone can throw a shine on aluminium and it can be achieved in as little as three stages from start to finish but the results speak for themselves. To get a flawless finish, one that’s perfectly flat with a deep mirror-like shine it just takes time and you have to be patient with it. Each propeller usually undergoes 18 stages of sanding and a further five stages of polishing to get it right and some of the big Hamilton Standard props I’ve done have taken almost 60 hours to polish front and back. 

   Since then I’ve now created the finest and largest collection of aircraft propellers in the UK, these are all for sale at my shop in Oxford which i open by appointment.  As well as the propellers I now do a range of aviation furniture including tables, mirrors and a host of other products which are all created using genuine aircraft parts. 

 Tom Ligertwood

  Aeroart