Bentley places great value on craftsmanship, quality and elegance ? and does it on a grand scale. Its new flagship, Mulsanne, is a fusion of modern technology and traditional British coach-building and the company has gone inside its factory to reveal the huge investment of skill and effort that goes into the creation of each vehicle.

It is the shunning of volume car manufacture that has allowed Bentley to create a vehicle that appears to be made from a single block of material, without visible panel seams.

The sweeping lines of the Mulsanne?s roof, rear wing and boot can only be achieved with a hand-brazed seam midway down the D-pillar. The quality of this type of work has earned craftsmen at Bentley?s factory in Crewe, England, a medal from the British Institute of Sheet Metal Engineering.

It requires 125 man-hours to create the body of a pre-production Mulsanne at the new assembly centre, where robotic arms carrying self-piercing riveters work alongside coachbuilders.

The shining bare metal shells that will eventually become a luxury car are created using a combination of high-strength steels and aluminium. These components are assembled into a complete shell using techniques that range from industry-leading adhesives through to hand-crafted brazing skills.

In complete contrast to the craftsman's time-honoured skills, is the use of superforming which is essential to create the highly-complex three dimensional curves of the Mulsanne?s front wings. This advanced technique, primarily used by the aerospace industry, heats a single sheet of aluminium to 500 degrees centigrade and then forces it onto a single surface tool using air pressure.

As Bentley prepares to produce the very first customer cars later this year, the body assembly team is undertaking a range of exhaustive tests on the first bodies being developed in pre-production.

This includes tearing apart completed bodies with specialist cutting gear to analyse the breaking point of a seam or weld as well as minutely measuring the accuracy of finished components and bodyshells ? a remarkable 588 functions and relationships are measured to ensure complete precision. In addition to cutting apart bodyshells, Bentley uses ultrasonic measuring equipment to analyse the strength and consistency of individual welds.

Prospective Mulsanne customers will be able to see their cars take shape, from individual panels to finished body, in a specially-designed viewing gallery.