It all started a few years ago with a phone call from a friend in the US who was thinking of selling his 1966 DB6 Vantage Mkl, a car I’d seen a few years before but never looked at it with the intention of buying it. I’d just a quick glance over the car but not even with the thought that one day I might have my very own Aston Martin.

All my experience of buying classic cars over the years went out the window, like an sensible person I would normally do my research, join a club, chat to owners and even see what the spares for that particular marque were like...but no, I said yes over the phone and bought it with my heart and not my head, the deal was done and the cash was transfered over.

I took a trip over to Oklahoma a few months later to see the car. There it stood, covered in dust wedged in between other project cars in the same building I’d seen a few years before. I spent the next few hours dragging it out of storage and searching for the missing interior which seemed to be scattered around the storage building. I took photographs from about every angle, as the car wasn’t going anywhere until I’d decided what to do with it...keep it and restore or was it too far gone and the best thing for it was to break it for parts!

Apart from the front bumpers, grill and headlights which were missing, the car was about 90% complete, but sadly the most important missing items were the Vantage engine and the 5 speed ZF gearbox. At first glance it didn’t look too bad, but then I looked underneath and saw the extent of the rust...and boy did the car have it. But it was a DB6 and it was all mine!

Back in the UK I started doing my research on the car, DB6/2773/LN left the factory on the 11th June 1966 heading for New York. Engine number: 400/7746/V with a manual ZF 5 speed, the original colour being Pale Primrose with a black interior. It also had a rear heated rear window and factory Normalair A/C. Price new was £3,241.5s.0d.

Those of you who log onto the AMOC website (www.amoc.org )will remember I posted a few photos, a brief description on the car and to see if I could find any of it’s missing history...well the response I had was varied. With offers of help and advice and wishing me good luck with the restoration, to ones that said it should be broken for spares or better still ‘drown the puppy’.

But by using the paperwork that came with car and a little help from the DMV (DLVA in the USA), I managed to trace some of the cars recent history.

In 1998 it was sold to a Mr John F Jacobs Jr, Clinton Township, Michigan from a Mr Joseph Ford, Prince Automotive, Leeds, Alabama. The trail went cold for a while, but after contacting the AMOC in the US I did find Mr. Randy Carlson who purchased the car from Mr. Jacobs in 1997/98.
He told me was living in Indianapolis at the time, and went up to Detroit to buy the car. It had already been media blasted and had considerably more parts on it than it does now, it was fitted with a 350 Chevrolet small-block and transmission. He thinks Mr. Jacobs had the car media blasted, as he had his own booth for the process. (incidentally he also invented the Jacobs Keyless Chuck used on all hand-held power drills, and the owner of several patents that run the power windows in virtually every car made in America). He was planning a hot rod restoration, and was going to paint it bright yellow, as every other vehicle, boat and airplane in his enormous warehouse was that color.

The story he was told was that it came out of the south somewhere (perhaps Alabama), where the Chevy engine was fitted after the original unit gave up. That wasn’t uncommon back then, he was also told that the car was submerged for a long period of time during a coastal flood. The corrosion to the chassis would seem to bear this out.

Randy decided to trade the car to a gentleman near Chicago who swapped a nice 1966 Mustang convertible plus some cash for the car.

I’ve looked into restoration companies in the America, Australia and New Zealand as the cost of restoration would have probably been less than the UK. But after all of this research I decided that I wanted it back in the UK as I could do most of the donkey work (I don’t mind getting my hands dirty) plus it would be easier to keep an eye on each stage of the restoration and I wanted to watch it’s progress over the next few years without having to plan holidays that would involve going to see the car.

After talking to various Aston Martin restoration specialists in the UK, and after a lot of thought I decided to give the work to Alan Smith of Alan Smith Motors in New Romney, Kent (www.alansmithmotors.com). We came to an arrangement on how the car was to be restored and a realistic time scale and more importantly we would work to a budget for each stage of the restoration. So in the summer of 2006 it was shipped over to the UK and taken down to Alan’s garage where he and I started to take it apart.

So every free Saturday I had over the summer months, the car was stripped down to reveal the scale of the rust and after hours of unscrewing, unbolting, cut fingers, cursing and many cups of tea later the car was apart, with front and rear sections of the outer shell removed and sent off to be dipped. By the end of November all that was left was the shell on four little wheels to push it around the workshop, and had just been media blasted and put into etch primer. We thought the roof would be okay but now that it’s been blasted we’ve found more, rot so I think the roof will have to come off.

As for the missing engine and ZF gearbox, well, believe it or not I found a DB6 engine that had been pulled from a DB6 about 20 years ago when it developed a hole in the block and the owner had installed a Jaguar engine into his DB6. So there it sat for 20 years until I bought it on ebay this summer. I didn’t realise how big or heavy they were until a friend and I had to manhandle one into to a hired van! Anyway it’s now stored in the corner of the workshop waiting to be rebuilt.

Over the winter months I’m going to sort out everything that came off the car and is sitting in my garage at home. I’ll either refurbish, restore or buy new parts as and when they are needed.