The last time this Aston graced these pages, it was held together with tape...
A childhood memory spawned a commitment to a sadly down-at-heel Aston DB MKIII. The cunning that came next was worthy of a spy novel
It’s a great project for a committed owner,’ we commented of this 1958 Aston Martin DB MKIII, registration 345 AKA, when we featured it in our Barn Finds pages in the July 2015 issue.
Many years ago, that committed new owner was a boy of 10 or 11, reading Goldfinger under the bedsheets after he was supposed to be asleep. Robert Thompson was excited by Bond’s glamorous life and particularly by the Aston DB MKIII saloon he used in the 1959 adventure. ‘I was brought up in a council house,’ says Rob. ‘The world of Bond seemed a million miles away, so it made a huge impression on me. That car stuck in my mind like a gorse seed. When the movie version came out, the car had become a DB5. But I knew the MKIII was the real thing.’
Fast-forward to Rob’s retirement in 2013, a visit to Classic Motor Cars in Bridgnorth inspired him to buy an E-type the very next day. ‘But the MKIII was that gorse seed, still lodged there,’ he says. ‘What would one of those be like? How do they compare?’ Rather than discover the answer by the easy route, Rob’s eye was caught by the auction-bound project MKIII.
‘The cost of the wreck was scary, considering the doors and bonnet were held on with gaffer tape,’ recalls Rob. ‘I thought it deserved better than that. It needed saving.’ Indeed, our article at the time remarked on the appeal of its history and desirable specification of overdrive and 178bhp engine. We also recounted the car’s early life as a prestigious company car registered to Littlewoods Mail Order Stores, and then a slow decline through various UK owners before a partial restoration in the mid-seventies, a crash, another repair and eventual storage from October 1977.
Rob soon turned the car over to CMC. Its Jaguar restorations are justly famous – we’ve featured a few ourselves – so another Fities twin-cam six-cylinder sports car shouldn’t be too much of a stretch. Indeed, a change from the norm appealed to some of CMC’S staff, like Ian Ryder, who volunteered for the job.
‘I couple of times later in the process, I wished I hadn’t volunteered,’ he admits. ‘It was certainly interesting but it’s a very complex car and it was in a bad way – something had been nesting in it!’
Ian says the strip-down to a bare bodyshell took six weeks, with the relevant specialists from CMC’S huge in-house team turning up to do their bit; the trimmer removed the interior, the electrician stripped out the loom and so on. ‘By contrast, we can strip an E-type in three weeks,’ he says. ‘Everything was seized and we were extra-certain to photograph everything as it came apart. I made a parts list right from the beginning as it became apparent what could and couldn’t be re-used.’ As well as discovering seized, disintegrating fixings, they could get a handle on the car’s dire structural condition.
The hidden truth
Body specialist Luke Martin peeled back the surface to expose the MKIII’S complicated structure, ‘Once everything was off the bodyshell, we could begin removing the aluminium panels from the structure underneath. I had to un-pick old and brittle aluminium as best I could, unwrapping its edges from steel tubes and boxes… at least, I did where there were any edges left.’
The sills wrap around a steel box-section, or are supposed to, but the wrapped areas had disintegrated. And while it looked as though the aluminium on the roof, the rear end and the huge bonnet could largely be saved, almost everything would need new metal grafted in to form these edge sections. ‘Then there was the steel underneath,’ says Luke. ‘This car’s chassis is more complicated than a pair of big tubes; the bulkhead, wheelarches, sills and B-posts are all part of it. And most of it was rusty.’
It had suffered a thump, too. That accident in 1976 had moved the main chassis member on the offside rear. ‘Before we began any repairs we mounted the chassis on a global jig,’ says Luke. ‘It fixes the chassis dimensions and suspension points and lets you make sure everything is square. But even then, some bits were too far-gone to replicate without any reference. When making the sill repairs, for instance, we had to visit Aston Martin Works to examine another example and take measurements.’
In the end, Luke and the bodyshop team cut out and replaced much of the bulkhead, the tubes in the middle of the car supporting the floor and transmission tunnel, the sills, the rear wheelarch quarters and the B-posts. They were also obliged to cut and re-position the chassis leg damaged in the accident. If that sounds like a time-consuming job, it was. But then CMC invested in something that allowed them to keep their craftsmen busy on both the chassis rebuild and the body at the same time – a wooden buck.
The buck starts here
The use of a wooden former or buck to help shape aluminium car bodies is an established, traditional approach, but it’s one that’s rarely open to restorers. But nowadays, 3D scanning technology has allowed the creation of bucks and formers based on finished cars. Luke Martin explains, ‘The pieces that form the buck are cut out very precisely as slices of the body’s shape and they arrive in a flat-pack,’ he says. ‘We built it up and could immediately start to check what we had against the true shape.’
Luke then had to make decisions about which sections could survive, and which were too corroded to stand up to further working or re-shaping. ‘Whenever I had to let new metal into the panels, I used TIG welding to make the joins because it imparts less heat distortion than gas welding. I prefer the smallest filler rod I can find, because I don’t want a large, obvious weld full of impurities.’
Being able to build the body up in sections on the buck was a huge advantage. It not only guaranteed a consistent line from front to back but made it certain that large pieces would butt together accurately when they had to be joined. ‘The roof and rear end ends up as one piece of aluminium,’ says Luke. ‘When it’s on the car, the front end wraps over the windscreen frame and the sides wrap over the guttering, which in turn fixes to the steel tubes underneath. In other words, you want to know it’s all going to fit before you start assembling it.’
The bonnet is the other large section. Luke re-made the edges and lower valance, repairing the rather slight steel tubes underneath. The doors, though, needed total replacement. ‘The steel tubes and their sheet steel surrounds were all rusty, and the aluminium skins over the top were also too corroded to fix. It was better to use them as patterns and re-fabricate the lot.’
In the engine room
Engine builder Andrew Turvey attended the initial stripdown to remove his part of the job. He discovered that a cylinder head swap in the Seventies had left the car with an incorrect, earlier cast-iron cylinder head. ‘You can get new alloy Alperform cylinder heads for the DB MKIII off the shelf,’ he says. ‘Luckily, the right manifolds for the original alloy cylinder head were still in the boot!’
Andrew stripped, blueprinted and rebuilt the new ’head, correcting a couple of high spots on valve seats. He also reduced the clearance on the cam bearings, because modern oils allow it to be as tight as one thou [0.001in]’. Further down, there was serious
‘Lying upside-down in the footwell to fit re-made parts of the wooden frame under the front bulkhead… that was tough. I didn’t enjoy that at all!’ Ian Ryder
work to do. The engine uses steel liners in an iron block, but the block itself had cracked. ‘The cracks were right down between the liners,’ says Andrew. ‘It would have panted – expanding like a bellows as it ran.’
There was nothing for it but to buy a new block, and this became a tipping point – from here, you’re building a brand new engine so Andrew was able to replace the original rather flimsy connecting rods and their heavy pistons with billet rods and Omega pistons. ‘They’re much lighter,’ he says, ‘and take the oil off the bore much better – they have a modern multi-piece oil control ring like a Gillette multiblade razor. We were leaving the capacity and power output as standard but with improved efficiency and reliability.’
The MKIII’S crankshaft gave Andrew an interesting challenge. It sits in three ‘cheeses’; large circular bearing carriers that are assembled around the crankshaft before the whole lot is loaded into the engine block from the rear. ‘It takes very precise machining and measuring,’ says Andrew. ‘The first time I assembled everything, the front crankshaft bearing, a press-fit in the front of the block, turned out to be too tight. So I had to strip it all out and re-size the crank by less than a thou on a very precise Prince grinder. But really you’re doing it by feel, because it’s difficult to measure down to tenths of a thou.’
Turning a corner?
With repairs to the chassis complete and the new engine built up, Ian Ryder and his colleagues finished refurbishing the suspension sub-assemblies and got the chassis rolling. ‘First there was that front cross-member to sort out,’ he says. ‘This generation of Astons employed a hefty, complicated arrangement of three aluminium castings, the centre one oil-filled with a steering idler running in it. I had to take it to bits but the major components survived for re-use, perhaps because it’s all a bit over-engineered.’
CMC refurbished the Armstrong lever-arm dampers and stripped, checked and rebuilt the car’s live rear axle and Panhard rod. New Alfin rear brake drums cost a painful £800 each, but soon the chassis was ready for the new engine and the gearbox, which had been rebuilt with new seals and bearings.
‘Now it could go off to the body shop,’ says Ian. ‘When the work to the body was completed and it was time to start fitting things up, we had to source new glass and make sure that would all go in as part of the dry fit. The car actually went to a show at this stage - bare metal, but with the glass in. I could check-fit the refurbished mouldings too, which are mostly chrome-plated lead.’
Inside and out
John Langston took charge of the Aston’s refinishing process. He started with a special acid wipe of the bare aluminium surfaces to give extra adhesion for the epoxy primer.
‘After that’s on, I could shape and gap the car with fine filler where required, then pre-prime it with high-build. I flatted this one dry; I didn’t want any water on the car because I didn’t want any water-borne contamination. I’m very careful with dust extraction as I go along, nothing gets left in the crevices.’
John likes to start with 400-grit papers on primer, moving to 600-grit to prepare the surface for solid colour.
‘I used Glasurit’s 90-line water-based paint for our base coat and then three coats of ultrahigh solids lacquer. Water-based paint is very good now; in fact the tinters are identical to solvent-based. The only difference is then choosing either a water or solvent binder.’
Next to inherit this beautiful object was trimmer Sam Brewer. He’d been busy on the seats he’d removed from the car earlier. ‘I shotblasted and painted the plywood and steel base frames, but the leather was too far gone to re-use. First there’s Pirelli webbing, then scrim foam, then a layer of calico and finally the hide. I used three Vaumol hides in all.’
That includes other small jobs like the radio box, speaker pods and the door pulls, which are chain inside a rubber tube with hand-stitched leather over the top. Sam remade the dash top in Everflex, a material more familiar on vinyl roofs. ‘I made a new headlining in woolcloth which was glued into the roof panel on a 6mm foam pad. The most timeconsuming job was the carpets… there are so many pieces!’
Sam’s final challenges included shimming out the aluminium window-edging pieces to meet the quarter-light frames and fitting seatbelts. ‘They had to look right. I hid a steel mounting plate inside the quarter-trim behind the front seats and used period buckles.’
A long road ends
The build-up process soaked away many months, as one snag after another held up completion. A wait for the correct cabling meant the loom in the rear of the car couldn’t be completed, and hence the rear interior trim had to wait too. A seized Lucas distributor of an uncommon type demanded a repair with pieces cannibalised from an XK120, a grumpy fuel pump needed to be rebuilt twice and the Bakelite sections inside the cam covers had to be repaired to carry the plug leads without allowing them to arc.
The restoration was into its fourth year by the spring of 2019, a long task by CMC’S efficient standards. ‘I’d built three E-types in the mean time!’ says Ian. Indeed, some 4500 hours had been poured into this extraordinarily thorough and dedicated job. The work to the major components is impressive, but a day spent with the craftsmen involved leaves you with an even greater feel for their detail work. For instance, they didn’t bead-blast the cam cover because it would have looked over-restored, so they rubbed it down with Scotchbrite, sanded with wet-and-dry and then polished by hand. Those steel-gauze air filters were not replaced, they were dismantled, straightened, the cotton elements washed in paraffin, dried and rebuilt. The many black nut and bolt heads are not painted or powder coated but gun-blacked – dipped in acid and then oil.
Rob Thompson’s 60-year-old fascination with the DB MKIII has led him down a long and costly road, but it’s hard to think of a more fulfilling journey. ‘To be the one who’s ultimately responsible for making the car beautiful again is a thrill. But the real credit should go to the team at CMC.’ He’s been delighted by the car’s reception at some of the UK’S most prestigious concours events but Rob’s aching to get it home and take it for that magical first drive so he can compare it with rival Jaguars and more importantly, know how James Bond once felt.
‘Seeing the car as a shiny, bare-metal bodyshell on the CMC stand at the London Classic Car Show – it revealed the lovely clean lines of the body’s design’ Rob Thompson