Aston Martin Factory July 1966

good God, your fathers old slides are amazing. Awesome man

 

One of the best AM stories I ever heard was told by Sir David Brown. After his purchase of Aston Martin, one of his plummy friends said "Now that you own Aston Martin, I shall look forward to purchasing one at cost in honour of our long friendship." Brown said "Absolutely you can, it will be the nearest to a profit making car as we've ever built."

 

Aston's are just so very good loking from any angle and any era, Great post, fabulous histroy.

Thanks,

Seb

 

Your pictures are worth more than 1000 words, they are simply priceless!

Thank you for sharing!

 

amazing, absolutely amazing

 

those pics are wonderful. In 1985, I bought a 1966 Db6, vantage spec engine with a webasto sunroof. The car was absolutely amazing. Connoly
hides, Wilton carpets, burled walnut steering wheel with mother of pearl
inlays, dunlop wire wheels. What a machine. According to the AM register,
it was one of seventeen DB6 vantage spec cars made.
So nice to see those shots... I hope to go to Newport Pagnell in two years.
But this coming year, (March '05), it's Maranello!

 

That's so terrific... Thank you for sharing!

 

Very nice pictures. Had a client who owned a DB5, little earlier then the pictures. He bought it in the 70's, just after becoming a dentist. Was his daily driver well into the 80's.

 

Beautiful things only get better with time........
Thanks for sharing.

 

A thing of beauty is a joy forever...

 

Here are photos from my visit to the DB7 factory in Bloxham, England in 2000. Everything in this factory was done manually.

Aston Martin DB7 Factory
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Great pics. Aston's are aesthetically the prettiest cars made IMHO

 

wow great stuff...we just traded our DB7 vantage in for a DB9 volante a couple weeks ago....still was great fun....DB7 definitely had that "hand crafted feel", for better or worse of course...

 

Unfortunately more worse than better

 

Nice write up in your blog! Just so you are aware though, no vanquish production or prototype work was carried out at bloxham at all. It was all carried out at Newport pagnel.

 

My comment about the Vanquish was speculation. There was something going on in Bloxham that they did not want customers to see and I never knew what it really was. I guessed the Vanquish because I couldn't think of anything else at the time.

 

There was often something to hide on the production lines. A VIP visitor, a scratched panel, etc etc. I worked in prototype development at Aston Martin on the DB7 vantage, LM 600, vanquish and a couple of others that never made it to production!

 

Interesting. I also saw two DB7 options shown to me by the production manager that I wanted. My DB7 had not yet been made so I hoped I could change my order.

I wanted the indentation in the interior roof to provide a little more headroom and I wanted the two back seats to be a shelf because the rear seats were not useful except to store items.

When I returned to California I went to the Aston Martin dealer and told them about these two options which they had not heard of. In the end I could not order these options because they were not homologated for the US.

This was very disappointing because the main reason we eventually sold the DB7 was the interior headroom was not enough for me.

 

Mike, the headroom was a common complaint. Part of the trouble was the anti-submarine seats that had to be fitted for crash testing. Plus federal homologation cost a huge amount at a time when Aston wasn't particularly flush. I've got a few pics of the proto cars somewhere and some other shots from my time there. I'll dig them up and post them! The baby V8 vantage actually started life as a mid-engined concept, using the jag engine and based on three prototypes utilising ultima chassis, but they scraped that idea

 

I also had a V8 Vantage - good headroom but not enough power. A beautiful car with a great sound.
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Very nice. As you rightly point out, underpowered, but very pretty! This is the original research and development team for the Vanquish, at Newport pagnell. As you can see, there weren't many of us, and even with a small budget the car was brought into production in just over two years from the first clay model!
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