About Us

Our Story

For Retrotec’s founder, Guy Black, it all began with a spark of curiosity in Rye Grammar school’s metalwork shop, where he made a small steam engine. This early fascination with engineering led to a Saturday job at the renowned high-speed engine research firm, Weslake & Company, Rye, where under the mentorship of Harry Weslake, Guy undertook an apprenticeship with academic studies at Ashford College. He gained invaluable experience, there, where his time at Weslakes included design work on a wide range of projects, from racing motorcycle engines to the iconic V12 F1 engine for Dan Gurney.
This hands-on experience sparked a deeper interest in racing, and soon Guy was behind the wheel himself, setting the stage perfectly for his first entrepreneurial venture – Lynx Engineering with Janice, his newly wed wife, who was press-ganged into a range of tasks from book-keeping to machining wheels on the company lathe.

Specialising in tuning and restoring Jaguar C and D Types, Lynx quickly established itself as a leader in the field, even building road-going replicas and undertaking complex body conversions. The success of Lynx allowed Guy to explore new horizons, including learning to fly and developing a passion for vintage aircraft restoration. Above all, he wanted a Spitfire, an aeroplane his RAF father wanted so badly to fly during the 2nd World War, but later, sadly died before Guy was able to venture aloft in a Spitfire.

Retrotec was born from this same spirit of learning and his existing deep-seated passion for engineering. From day one, our mission has been to bring this enthusiasm to everything we do, from restoring vintage aircraft to innovating new ideas and solutions. Our highly skilled team of like-minded individuals all share this unwavering dedication to craftsmanship, precision, and the continual pursuit of knowledge. Along with the very same passion that ignited Guy’s journey—ensuring that our work not only meets but exceeds the highest standards of excellence in both engineering terms and in absolute authenticity.

A major ‘first’ was the restoration of two original DH9 bombers that his wife and he found in an elephant stable in India. Guy wrote an excellent book on this, called “DH9 From Ruin to Restoration”, and copies are available from the company. More recently, Retrotec received an order to re-manufacture new main wheels for the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight’s Lancaster, when major industry had failed to achieve this. Retrotec’s long experience in designing and manufacturing in magnesium using traditional engineering practices held good, and enabled the aircraft to fly again when no original wheels could be found in good enough condition to fly this iconic survivor.

Forty years after founding Retrotec, Guy is still hard at it, but his daughter Anne, is gradually taking over the reins, thus keeping the business in the family. Her background, apart from a passion for historic car racing, is in business management, which perhaps has ignited a much-needed ‘sensible’ boost to the company, Guy being very much engineering led, and an uncontrollable collector of all things aviation and motoring, – being quite bored by the intricacies of finance.