OUR CLASSICS
John’s Aston restoration has involved a large amount of welding, and consequent wallet-crushing expenditure…
1970 ASTON MARTIN DBS V8
The Aston has a kind of automotive blue blood – in my eyes at least – but I can hereby declare, with absolute certainty, that any perceived level of nobility has no impact on steel’s ability to rust; quite the reverse in fact.
Aston’s famous hand-building process used an immensely strong steel platform chassis onto which aluminium panels were attached. That is, in itself, an invitation to rust because all that’s needed to create bimetallic (or galvanic) corrosion once the barrier material between the two materials breaks down is some water (or, if you want to speed things up, salt water).
I shouldn’t have been surprised that the Aston turned out to be quite as rusty as it was because I visited Aston’s factory in Newport Pagnell in 1978 at the age of ten to go on a factory tour and I clearly remember examining the car ‘skeletons’ resting outside the factory waiting for the next stage of the production process with great fascination but minimal real understanding. Those 1978 single-headlight V8s are little different to my early twin-headlight car and that memory of incomplete cars wearing only a very thin layer of primer sitting outside in Britain, where it rains practically every day, came flooding back.
The tour was conducted by Aston’s long-time PR man and Leica-wielding photographer, Roger Stowers, whom I’d got to know after sending my pocket money to help save the company a few years earlier.
OWNED SINCE April 2020 MILAGE SINCE LAST REPORT 0 TOTAL MILEAGE 87,553 LATEST COSTS Quite a lot…
At the time it was, without any shadow of a doubt, the absolute best day of my life.
One of the reasons I love this particular DBS V8 so much is that my car’s first owner – steel magnate and Aston Martin director, Dennis Flather – still owned it when I visited the plant that day. I like to think that I may even have seen it there, but the reality is that I don’t have a specific memory of seeing a green DBS V8, although I saw so many Astons that day that I was excited about it for months afterward.
I don’t think my school mates really believed me until they saw the pictures of me at the factory a week or two later.
GTC Engineering knows these cars and where to look for rust. They initially thought that mine wasn’t too bad because the sills – the most common and important known weak point
