Welcome back to the Bespoke Automotive Refinement podcast based here in the Kansas City area. Today we have Thomas Thill, the owner and founder of Bespoke Automotive Refinement. Thank you so much for joining us today.
So happy to be back. So today I just wanna talk about one of the services that I feel like are nearest and dearest to your heart and that is paint correction. So more than that, I know you enjoy the Kansas City car detailing services that we offer, but I think even more than that, you love doing paint correction because of the difference that it can make on somebody’s car.
And there are certain things that when we met, I never noticed this. And now whenever I see a car, I just immediately can see exactly what you’re talking about when you’re talking about swirl marks or when a car needs to have paint correction done on it. First talk about what actually causes a car to need paint correction services.
Like what are some basic things that people do that they might not even know that can actually damage the paint of their car? Well, number one, I mean, there’s so many different things that can cause it. I do vehicles that are brand new, fresh out of the factory. I’ve taken the plastic off of million dollar cars before and immediately started paint correcting them because they come from the manufacturer with paint defects.
So you’ve got orange peel, number one. Orange peel is that texture in your paint that looks like an orange peel. It’s not smooth.
A lot of cars, almost every car comes from the manufacturer with some of that. So you’ve got orange peel. You’ve got delivery and pre-delivery scratches.
So like when you buy a brand new car, the dealership will go through and they’ll spend a couple hours working on the car, just making sure that everything runs okay and works okay. And a lot of times they’re leaning over the paint and they’ve got grease and sand on their shirt. So you get scratches, you get micro scratches from that, or they may lay a tool down on the hood.
What about if somebody has a Jeep and in order to close it, they use their foot to close the trunk of their car? That’ll do it for sure. That will definitely cause micro scratching. So micro scratching is basically a scratch that doesn’t look like a deep enough scratch to notice in the dark, but in the sunlight you see they’re almost like swirls.
So you’ve got swirls just from years of being washed improperly, like taking a car through an automatic wash or someone, you know, even guys that, mobile washing services that’ll come to your house and professionally wash your vehicle, they still can improperly wash it, causing scratches. I worked on a lifted F250 last week that I could tell the person that washes it just continuously put scratches in it because they’re reusing the same mitt to wash that truck as they are 10 other vehicles. They’re not properly washing the mitt and they’re not properly getting the grit out of the mitt.
So then they’re taking a gritty mitt with rocks and sand and they’re wiping it all over the paint. Over time that causes scratching. So, and another thing is someone attempting to perform a paint correction with improper methods or not using, you know, using a rotary polisher without proper methods or proper knowledge.
They’ll put hologram marks, swirls, and buffer trails. That will also cause a vehicle to need a paint correction. So I would say literally every vehicle on the road that has not been paint corrected needs paint corrected.
Something that I had on one of my vehicles, it was my college, my first car, it was my college car. I traveled all over the United States in it and it had so many little rock chips on the front of it. And this is before I met you and knew much about cars and I was like, this would be a huge project. I don’t even know how you can get started.
Like maybe I myself could buy a little paint marker and fix it, but there were hundreds of little rock chips on the front of the car. What would you do? Like, can you fix rock chips on the front of somebody’s car? Can you fix their paint? Absolutely. So what I do is I find the paint code for your car and I have it professionally mixed so it’ll match.
And then I use medical syringes. Whenever I show up at a client’s house, they see a bunch of medical syringes, they think I have a drug problem. No, it’s not.
And I pull the paint out of the paint jar into the syringe and I just fill in every little rock chip, let it dry for a couple hours. Then I’ll wet sand it with 3000 grit and then I’ll go over it again with 5000 grit. And then I’ll compound it twice, polish it, and it completely hides it.
Like if you get really close, like 10 inches away from it, you’ll see it, but just walking up to it, walking around it, you won’t notice it. So if somebody wanted to get their car paint corrected, what are the different levels or stages that they could get it done? So I have three different levels of paint correction. First is the single stage paint correction.
The single stage paint correction is what I refer to as a gloss enhancement. So it’s not really gonna remove the swirls. It’s gonna take a lot of them out, but it’s not gonna completely remove all of them, but it’s really gonna add depth to the paint.
It’s gonna make it way more reflective and it’s gonna hide a lot of those imperfections. And this is a true paint correction. It says it’s just a polish where I polish it and then using filler polishes, then it’ll break down.
It’s like it’s actually gonna look that way for years if you maintain it properly. So that’s a single stage. And then I have a two stage paint correction, which is a compound and then a polish.
So the compounding method, I actually work on removing all of the little swirls and scratches that I can and then I hit it with polish to get the paint to pop. Then I have a three stage paint correction. A three stage paint correction is where I wet sand the entire car, sometimes twice.
So I’ll do two different levels of wet sanding and then compound it to get the gloss back out of it, polish it again to get some true depth in the finish. And then on those jobs, I just do a ceramic coating because I’m already spending a week on the vehicle. A couple hours of ceramic coat, it’s worth it.
So ceramic coat it after that. How long does it take for each of those stages to get done? If somebody wants to get the car worked on, how long does it take? It completely depends on the size of the vehicle. Single stage paint correction on a car usually takes a day.
On a truck, it takes about a day and a half. Two stage paint correction typically takes two to three days on a car and then it takes about a week on a truck. And then a three stage paint correction will take a week to two weeks on a car and a truck will take a lot longer than that.
It’s quite a bit of time. So if somebody is wanting to get their car paint corrected specifically, how would they get in touch with you? So to reach our Kansas City Auto Detailing Service, you can give me a call at 620-282-0402 or you can look at our Kansas City Auto Detailing website. It’s www.BespokeAutomotiveRefinement.com.
Either one of those ways, you can book with us.
And if you just want to have a great conversation with somebody who loves cars, absolutely just lives and breathes cars, give Thomas a call. He would love to have a conversation with you about cars and it’s a free consultation for him to come out and look at your car and give you a quote. So call us today at 620-282-0402.