Hello, Kansas City. Welcome back to the Bespoke Automotive Refinement podcast, the best in Kansas City Auto Detailing. Today we have with us the man, the myth, the legend, the Thomas David Thill, the man who started Bespoke Automotive Refinement and is truly just a passionate man about cars.
Thank you so much for joining us today to share some of your wisdom. Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much for having me.
I love talking about this stuff, especially about Kansas City Auto Detailing. So I know a lot of you have questions about cars. Maybe you’re new to cars.
Maybe you know a lot about cars. Maybe there’s just some nuances that you don’t fully understand. So today I’m going to ask questions that I have kind of been wondering about.
And I’m excited to hear your thoughts on them. Are you ready? Let’s hear it. All right.
So whenever before we met, I hired a detailing service to come in and wax my car. Yeah. Now it just sounded like something that seemed like a good idea.
I actually didn’t know the benefit of it. But you yourself are not a huge fan. You don’t Bespoke Automotive Refinement doesn’t offer that as a package.
Or service. My favorite saying is hashtag wax is dead. So what exactly does waxing do and what do you not like about it? What is a better service? So waxing is something that has really been in the automotive space has been popular since cars first came out in the early 1900s.
And up until about ten, 15 years ago was really the only mainstream way to keep your paint protected. The reason that I’m not a fan of wax is very early on in my car detailing career, I was the I was either the second or the third person in the state of Kansas to offer ceramic coating. So very early on in my detailing career, I was ceramic coating vehicles.
I learned the benefits of ceramic coating. And in the early days, I was offering wax as a a side option. If someone didn’t want to pay for a ceramic coating, they just wanted to have their car paint corrected and then just waxed.
I would wax them. And I learned that number one, when you wax a vehicle, you apply it by hand, you rub it in in a circular motion and that can put micro scratches in the paint. So after spending an entire week paint correcting a beautiful black vehicle and then getting it perfect, you’re then applying wax by hand in a circular motion and putting new swirl marks in it.
And wax, no matter what type of wax, whether it’s a synthetic wax, whether it’s carnauba wax, whether it’s spray wax, it doesn’t actually bond to the clear coat. It bonds to the fibers on the outside of the clear coat because your car has friction, right? So like if you’ve ever ran your finger, your hand across a blanket when there’s friction on it and it shocks you, cars paints the same way. So you have friction on top of the clear coat and that friction has fibers and that’s what the wax sticks to.
So when the vehicle gets wet, that wax washes right off and it’s gone. So no matter how perfect of a wax job you do, the first time it gets wet, it’s done. A ceramic coating flashes to the clear coat.
So when a vehicle is ceramic coated, I soften the clear coat and I open the pores in the clear coat to accept the ceramic coating. And that coating is so hard that when it dries, if you have any imperfections in it, you literally have to wet sand it out. So whereas wax, you can just wipe it off a car.
This you have to spend hours sanding out a spot the size of a quarter. So again, I got into when I first got into the detailing game, ceramic coating was a very new thing. A lot of the old school detailers were, you know, they thought it was snake oil.
They thought it was a scam. I was kind of the rebellious one, so I immediately dove right in. I wanted to learn everything about it.
And that’s why I use the term wax is dead because no one really waxes vehicles anymore. What stems between ceramic coating and ceramic sealant? So a ceramic coating is a 9H or a 10H coating that you apply by hand and it flashes to the clear coat. And when it dries, it is so hard that it has to be sanded out of the paint.
It’s a true coating. It can be just as hard as a clear coat in your vehicle’s paint. Ceramic sealant is a step above hand waxing, in my opinion.
It’s basically a ceramic coating that you spray onto the paint and then you wipe it on and you wipe it off. It makes it slick, but it doesn’t actually bond chemically to the clear coat. It just bonds itself to those fibers on the outside of the clear coat.
But whereas a wax job only lasts for a couple of weeks, I have ceramic sealants that last all the way up to a year. Wow. OK, next question.
What is clay bar? So a clay bar. So have you ever had someone doing paint work like they’re repainting their house or they’re repainting their deck and your car is parked way down the street in the driveway? You don’t think it’s going to happen. You don’t think it’s going to affect it.
But you walk out to your car and you run your hand across the hood and you have these little hard spots. Overspray or tree sap. These are things that you can’t wash off the paint that are stuck to the paint.
A clay bar is just that it’s a literal bar of clay that you rub on the clear coat of your entire vehicle and it removes contaminants in the clear coat that are stuck inside the clear coat that make the surface smooth enough to add any sort of sealants or perform paint correction. I clay bar every vehicle I do before I ever paint correct it. So would it get rid of asphalt? Like things that hard or is it just more of a… No.
Asphalt is kind of like you’re talking about like dried on concrete. Yes. That’s a really tough one.
Because it’s so gritty that once you get it off then you’re scratching the paint because it’s like basically like rubbing your vehicle with rocks. I’ll be up front. I’ve never.
I’ve I’ve I turned down every opportunity I have to remove asphalt from a vehicle because it’s just something like that really needs to go to a body shop and really needs to be repainted. That’s something that a detailer should not be tackling. So for a car that has rock chips in it let’s say someone works in construction or they travel a lot.
Is that something that you can fix? Yes. 100%. I do it very differently than a lot of other guys.
Whereas some other detailers will just dab the touch-up paint into the chip. Let it dry. I put the paint in the rock chip.
Let it dry. Wet sand it and correct it. And it blends it to the actual finish so much more smoothly that it doesn’t look as obvious that it’s there.
That makes sense. So if somebody’s wanting to have one of your Kansas City auto detailing service done on their vehicle or vehicles how do they get a hold of you? I would love to perform a Kansas City auto detailing service for someone. Performing Kansas City auto detailing services is honestly one of my favorite things.
So if you are looking to have anything performed on your vehicle you can go ahead and give us a call at 620-282-0402. I have a plethora of Kansas City auto detailing packages that I can offer and we can discuss what goals you’re looking to achieve with your vehicle and what we can do to help you achieve those goals.