In 1972 the Acrow Group acquired Coles crane business and despite continued sales the company was not making money. Investment was put into all parts of the Coles group and for a while market were held but there was strong and competition from European manufacturers and this was hitting Coles the foreign markets . This decline in foreign trade was to hit the Grantham factory hard as most of it production went into the export market.. Acrow began a drastic slimming down process of all the Coles group to cut costs. By 1982 the management at the Grantham found themselves having to gave workers an hour to volunteer for voluntary redundancy before shedding 95 jobs due to the slump in orders.

The following year 1983 the factory was working one week on and one off but the management could not predict the future as the industry was also being hit by a general recession.

In 1984 the whole of the Acrow Group went bankrupt, this was not ironically anything to do with the problems in the crane operation but due to bad investments by the Acro corporate management, whose share dealing had been hit by the share price slump the year before.

There is not much information about the actual closure of the plant but closure must have been quite sudden as the records show that in 1985 the whole of the Dysart Road site was sold to the development group Autumn Park Ltd.