All right, Kansas City, we have a really fun podcast up ahead for you. All of you looking to have Kansas City Car Detailing services done to your car. Today we have the one and only Thomas Thill.
He is an award-winning paint correction specialist and khe does incredible work in the auto detailing industry here in Kansas City. Thomas Thill, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you for that introduction. That really makes me feel special.
You are very special. Everyone that sees your work is just completely blown away by whether it’s just a simple wash you go above and beyond to a full-on paint correction that takes several days to do what you can do on a trailer. It is absolutely outstanding work.
Thank you. When you’re doing auto detailing, I am sure that you have seen a wide range of situations and stories and cars and just wild things that have happened. What is one of the craziest things that you’ve experienced or seen doing Kansas City Car Detailing?
I’ll tell you, I’ve seen a lot of very interesting things. One that sticks out tremendously was I got a phone call from an individual who had purchased a car recently from an auction. They told me that it had a bunch of stains on the leather.
I didn’t ask what the stains were. I just showed up at this person’s house. When I showed up at their house, I noticed that the door and the front fender were not painted yet.
It was a car that someone had bought to do some work on the flip. I opened the driver door and there was blood everywhere. There was glass shards everywhere.
They had replaced the glass. The car was involved in some sort of shooting. I got my hazmat suit out and went to town and cleaned out all of the blood.
That was very interesting. I would say that’s one that sticks out to me. Another one that I did, I used to do work for a dealership that bought repo cars.
This was early on in my detailing career when I really wasn’t working on exotics. I was working on the nastiest cars you can imagine. They had purchased a Chevy Traverse.
They had told me that it was pretty bad. I showed up to work on it. The person that had owned this car before it got repoed was homeless.
They were living in the car with a child. I found dirty diapers were shoved up underneath the back seats. If you know what a Chevy Traverse is, they have these tracks that the second row seat slides in and out of.
Stuff can fall in those seats. There were all sorts of nasty, sticky substances that were in those tracks that the seats couldn’t even move forward or backwards. That one definitely sticks out to me.
The last one is a car that I did about nine years ago. I did a Jeep Grand Cherokee that was a couple years old. The person was a regular smoker.
They used the floorboard as an ashtray. They would throw the empty cigarette cartons on the passenger floorboard. When I saw this car and opened the driver’s door, the driver’s side floorboard was literally covered in cigarette butts.
Hundreds of them. As far as fun jobs that I’ve done, I did a Maserati Ghibli Spider that was in the middle of restoration while it was still on the rotisserie being painted. It had just been painted.
I did a full correction on it while the car was completely disassembled. I’ve done multi- million dollar hypercars, supercars, and collector cars.
Now, I have heard a story that if somebody ever needs Kansas City Car Detailing travel package done, they could probably hire you out for it if they call you at 620-282-0402 to set this up. You went on a rally with a bunch of Ferraris while on the rally.
I’ll let you tell the story.
But you ended up detailing. Was it over 40 cars?
Yeah, it was over 40 cars. Basically, what had happened, I went on a Ferrari rally for fun. It wasn’t supposed to be a work trip.
I do a lot of Ferraris in Kansas City. I offer Kansas City Car Detailing services for the Ferrari Owners Club of Kansas City. I was invited by the president of the Ferrari Club to just go for fun.
There were 38 Ferraris at this rally. They had hired a mobile detailing service out of Tulsa to come down. The first night, these two guys who had actually been doing the rally for 15 years, they had gone to this open bar that the first night of the Ferrari rally had put on, and they got really drunk.
They went out there to wash everyone’s cars while they were drunk, and their pressure washer didn’t work. Instead of trying to problem solve, they just basically threw in the towel and left. All these people, high and dry, who had paid them thousands of dollars to clean their cars on each stop.
This Ferrari rally was called a progressivo, which is where you go from one location to another and basically loop the entire state of Arkansas. So I saw a need. I saw a demand for a service.
So I actually ran to Tractor Supply and using someone else’s car. I bought a pressure washer. I bought everything that I needed.
It was very, very little materials to do something like that, but ended up washing 38 Ferraris three nights in a row. Start on them at 8.30 and finish them around 4 o’clock in the morning, and then wake up the next morning. Sleep for a couple hours, wake up, drive to the next place.
Then while everyone was either having dinner or enjoying the open bar, I was washing Ferraris. I had some help. Adam Patale, who’s the founder of Adam’s Polishes, which is one of the main products that I offer, was actually at the rally.
So I spent three nights in a row washing 38 Ferraris with the founder of one of the most prestigious car detailing products in the world.
What has been your favorite car that you’ve ever detailed?
That’s a really good question. What’s unique about what I do is I get to experience a lot of different cars. Even if I’m driving them just from the driveway around to the garage to work on them, I still drive them.
And so I’ve gotten to realize, I’ve gotten to learn that there are a lot of really cool cars out there. The average person would think they are high quality that are really cheaply made. But my favorite car that I’ve ever worked on was a Porsche 911 GT2 RS.
It was Miami blue. It belonged to a very, very great customer of mine. And I immediately fell in love with the color of the car.
I had never seen a Miami blue Porsche before. This is the first one I’d ever seen. So I spent about a week with that car, painting, correcting it, and ceramic coating it.
And then this Kansas City Car Detailing client of mine had me deliver the car to his house, which was about a 45 minute drive from my shop. At the time, I had a facility in another city and I drove this Porsche 911 GT2 RS for 45 minutes and this customer told me, have fun with it. And that was really the first time I ever really got to experience a hyper car to that scale.
And that car is still one of my dream cars to this day.
That is so cool. So if you are someone looking for Kansas City Car Detailing, please reach out to www.bespokerefinement.com or call 620-280-0402. Just call Thomas and have a great conversation with somebody who just absolutely adores cars and you will feel better about your day after talking to him.