In an industrial park in the town of Mielec, some 80 miles east of Krakow, Poland, artisans of aluminum sculpt Jaguar shells from sheetmetal.
At Gregson Polska, the small team of craftsmen delivers around ten restorations and a further five to 15 hand-formed bodies to customers and specialists around the world.
Poland might seem an unlikely location to find experts on the English Wheel and other traditional coachbuilding tools. For the company’s British founder, Robert Gregson, there was no comparison when it came to the combination of skill and value that he found in the East European country some 20 years ago.
Gregson Polska
Gregson Polska
“[Mielec is] actually a big aircraft town. Just next door to me is PZL, which assembles Black Hawk helicopters for the U.S. And it just so happens that 500 meters away, I’ve got one of the best paint shops in the whole of this region,” says Gregson. “All the engineering I need to make parts, laser cutting, and so on, it’s all around me.”
The family has been involved in coachbuilding for three generations. Gregson’s grandfather started his business turning former army trucks into bread vans, before moving into sales. His father invested in the Proteus company, which made replica Jaguar C-Types. After a spell in the British army, Gregson joined the family business and began looking for a new project.
After a couple of false starts, Gregson settled on manufacturing Jaguar bodies to be used in restorations. On the roster, you’ll find the C-Type and D-Type, the XKSS, the XK120, XK140, XJ13, and every iteration of E-Type you can imagine. The company has even reproduced a body for an XJ220.
Gregson Polska
Gregson Polska
Gregson Polska
On these foundations, Gregson Polska has also built a reputation for crafting prototypes and one-offs. “People have a dream, and they say, ‘I’ve got this chassis. Can you make this body?’”
Gregson continues: “Right now, I’m just in discussions with a customer, and all he’s got is that he can send me a chassis, and three pictures of what he’d like. The rest is down to us to try and make that car from those three photos onto that chassis. You know, it’s not easy, because we’re going to have to use our imagination.”
Whatever the project, the process is very old school, says Gregson. “If you’ve got a tape measure, then you know what’s square. We did a car for a customer, and when he got it back, he rang me up and said, ‘Oh, we just laser scanned the car, and the front window from the left to the right is one millimeter out.’ He didn’t sound happy, but I explained that for a hand-built car, that is pretty perfect.”
Another example of Gregson’s obsession with detail is that when supplying unpainted bodies they refuse to polish the aluminum. In fact, the treatment is quite the opposite. “We always scuff the body off, because we’re saving the customer about £2000 ($2700) at the paint shop. As soon as you take that body to the paint shop looking all shiny, they’d have to spend two weeks scuffing it up to get a key on the alloy.”
While Poland was probably not on the shortlist as a place to get your classic Jag restored, perhaps it should be.
Gregson Polska