BEST OF BRITISH: Aston Martin Works tour

Flashy wheels, LED lights, an engine tune or loud exhaust perhaps? Common modifications for common cars.

But what if you wanted to re-upholster your DB6, or change your Vantage from auto to manual? Or even weaponise your DB5, 007-style?

For one Aston Martin owner, the unorthodox request was genuine.

"I have had someone ask if we can put machine guns onto the front of the car. Real ones, absolutely," explains Justin Pearce, Senior Manager of Sales at Aston Martin Works.

Located in Newport Pagnell, a sleepy town in the West Midlands, Aston Martin Works sits 20 paces across the road from the original Aston factory, and has been the heart of soul of the company since 1955.

Today it’s where you go to get your Aston Martin One-77 serviced, or your rusted-out barn-find DB4 restored to concourse condition. Or you can ask for machine guns.

"It was a customer who wanted the James Bond car," continues Pearce over tea and scones, naturally, "and obviously wanted it to be as close to the original as possible".

"My next question was 'Do you have a category-five firearms license?' and unfortunately he didn't, so we weren't able to," he laughs.

AM Works functions as the company's flagship showroom too, along with all the behind-the-scenes stuff, such as modern and heritage workshops, paint shops, accident repair centres, electrical and upholstery shops.

A day spent exploring Aston Martin Works is edifying and educational. Watching panel beaters form the bodies for vintage cars, using the same techniques as those used in the original factory, is astonishing… And discovering that a 1969 Aston Martin DBS is horrifically undervalued, according to one worker, is intriguing!

Indeed, some of the spanner men who built many of the original, now vintage, Astons still work here today and many of the moulds and templates required to recondition car panels are the same ones that were used to build the original vehicles.

Although it's not as big or as busy or as high-tech as the avant-garde Aston Martin factory in Gaydon, it's just as fascinating, especially all the vintage equipment, tools and methods by which classic cars are restored.

The famous British car-maker was founded in 1913 and was sold to entrepreneur David Brown in 1947, who then purchased this Newport-Pagnell facility from Salmon and Sons Tickford Coach builders.

"Brown needed a ready-made workforce that were able to panel beat, effectively," explains Pearce.

"This was a huge site improvement to where we were in Fealton [Middlesex]. The first cars bodied here were the DB2-4s, 1953, the hatch," he says, noting the engines came from Middlesex.

"We were building cars here from 1955 until 2007," explains Pearce, "and the building across the road was also global HQ for Aston Martin up until 2003."

"The first cars to be completely built here were DB4s, that was the real game-changer for us in 1958."

Today the AM Works operation employs 107 workers, most of them possessed of unique skillsets that are currently being passed on to a new generation of apprentices.

The highly-specialised group are like the A-Team of Aston Martin conservation, and can fabricate any panel for any car. In fact, they can go one step further, transforming a coupe into a roadster.

"We've all got used to the fact that modern cars have power steering, good brakes, navigation systems, central locking. So if customers want power steering [on a vintage car] we can fit it.

"If they want all the mod-cons we can tuck them away, make the buttons very discreet, so they're not diluting the aesthetic of a beautiful classic car with modern features," explains Pearce.

A case in point is the Aston Martin DB5, in which the big speaker grille at the bottom of the centre stack can be modified by AM Works to tilt up, with a sat-nav screen hidden behind it.

"It's really subtle, and it doesn't affect the looks of the car's interior," he says.

Anyone who's invested in a collectible car will know that maintaining, fixing or heaven forbid restoring a vehicle is a costly exercise. But done correctly, it can be a savvy investment insists Pearce.

"We recently saw a DB6 MkII Vantage, manual, one of only 71 cars produced. It needed a full restoration, which is about 4500 hours work. It's an immense process to take a car through," he said.

That 4500 hours is about a year's work, involves stripping the vehicle back to bare metal, working out what's salvageable and what parts need replacing. Any parts required are fabricated in the same fashion when they rolled off the factory floor.

And the cost? You don't want to know… Well OK, for that particular vehicle it was £400,000 ($A677,000) to restore it, but Pearce reckons it's good value.

"So it's a lot of money but break that down to pounds per hour, it's around £100 ($A170) per hour. I don't think that's expensive. Go to the Land Rover dealership up the road -- they charge £135 ($235) an hour to service your Defender."

The Aston Martin Vulcan, the One-77, provenance and car collecting
He says that Aston Martin's provenance committee goes over vehicles requiring appraisal and can tell if everything's original or not, because the company still has the original build sheets for all the cars ever built. Simply put, it can check to see how a specific vehicle left the factory back in the day.

"It's based on a bronze to platinum grading. Bronze would be slightly changed, perhaps a different colour, but it's a nice car. Platinum is virtually the same as it left the showroom floor. Not many cars get a platinum grade.

"What you get when you restore a car here is the best skill set in the world for restoring an Aston Martin. The value of your car, having been a Works restored car, is improved," says Pearce.

He points to a pristine DB5 coupe sitting in the foyer. To my bleary eyes it looks in mint condition, fresh off the factory floor, completely immaculate inside and out.

"That car there, that's not been restored by us. So that's £950,000 ($A1.6m). If it's a Works-restored car it'd be worth £1.2 million ($A2m). You are paying more to have your car restored by us, but the extra you get in the resale value of your car is much higher."

Such is the quality of work provided by the unassuming facility – which looks like an ordinary dealership from the street – that many customers ship their Astons from overseas to ensure the best levels of service and maintenance. We saw a Vulcan and a One-77 in the shop, for instance.

And just like Pizza Hut, AM Works delivers.

"We can send our technicians out to anywhere in the world. Our heritage team [dubbed the Flying Spanner] recently went out to Japan and did some service work on a collection of customer cars out there."

With one eye on the past, Aston Martin Works is also looking to the future with several sales of the striking AM-RB 001 – for which demand has already outstripped supply  – already signed and sealed at the Newport-Pagnell location.

"I think that's a game-changer for Aston Martin," opined Pearce of the new hypercar. "It'll put us in a league we haven’t been in. We have made bespoke sports cars for a long time and we've done it very, very well. But what that car will do is elevate the brand of Aston to a new level."

Powered by an advanced hybrid V12 layout, Pearce says the $5million rear-driven road rocket will be "biblically quick".

"We've taken a number of orders for that car — deposits paid, contracts signed," he said.

Many owners are likely to get the AM-RB 001 serviced at Aston Martin Works too. And what modifications could be made to the AM-RB 001?

"There are no boundaries — anything's possible," says Pearce. "Except machine guns."

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