Hello, Kansas City. Welcome back to the Bespoke Automotive Refinement Podcast. We are so glad that you are with us.
Right now, we are actually heading to visit family for Thanksgiving, so I hope all of you are doing well and that your cars are driving well on the road. We are already getting close to winter, so be sure to contact us at bespokerefinement.com or 620-282-0402 to get something booked to protect your car for this upcoming winter. Now, today we have on the show the founder and creator of Bespoke Automotive Refinement, the premier Kansas City Car detailing service business in the Kansas City area, Thomas Thill.
Thank you so much for joining us. Oh, I’m so happy to be here. I’m so happy to be here.
Now, you got to do something this past week that you’ve had somewhat experience with. You’ve taken it to a whole other level. What is it that you did this week that was all new and fun? Yeah, so this past week, I was contacted by one of my clients.
I managed his Ferrari collection, and he reached out. I guess he reached out a couple weeks ago and asked if I did aircraft. With our Kansas City Car detailing service, we service so many more things other than cars.
We do boats, we do motorhomes, and we do aircraft. He reached out and asked if I could do a small airplane, and I obliged. I showed up at the air hangar to look at this airplane that he was wanting to have me do.
It was definitely not a small airplane. It was a brand new Learjet 45. It was about a $20 million jet.
He just spent a million dollars, literally, not making this up, a million dollars on a paint job for this airplane. Wow. So you would expect it to be perfect then, right? Yes.
Well, no, but yes. I was expecting it to look the way any hand-painted paint job would look, which this one looked exactly the way I thought it would. So I showed up on site, and I put my paint correction light on it.
And I saw tons of imperfections in the finish, lots of missed sanding marks, lots of rotary burns, and the bright work on all the leading edges was extremely dull. So the customer, in this instance, did not opt for a full paint correction because that would have taken about a month. But he did opt for a full exterior detail and a ceramic coating.
So I ended up hand-washing the aircraft three times. Oh, wow. I hand-washed it three separate times.
And then between using different scaffoldings, different ladders, I ceramic coated the entire
exterior and did an interior detail on it as well. And one thing that we do offer with our Kansas City Car Detailing is bright work. A lot of people don’t know what bright work is.
It’s the chrome finish. It’s metal polishing, essentially. So this customer, this aircraft that belonged to this customer, had very dull metal all the way across it.
I think it came that way from the factory. So I ended up taping off all of the paint and correcting all of the bright work on it. Wow.
How long did it take you to do all this? How long does it take to do an aircraft? I haven’t added up the hours yet, but I think it’s somewhere close to 40 hours. Now what exactly is bright work? So bright work is essentially metal or polished aluminum or polished metal. So, you know, if you see polished wheels on a car, a lot of people mistake polished for chrome.
It’s not. Chrome is an overlay. The polished metal, it’s a full compound.
So you don’t have a clear coat. You can’t really burn it. You’re just polishing through corrosion to get that deep gloss effect.
I will say, when I saw the before and after of what you did, it basically went from looking like you’re trying to do your makeup by using the reflection of the ocean water versus using a mirror. It was a complete 180 change of look, and it was shiny and brilliant and just absolutely gorgeous by the time you were done with the bright work. I was extremely impressed with the way that it finished out.
It had a lot of dullness to it. It had a lot of corrosion to it, and I believe that’s how they come from the factory, just because they store all of this polished metal in separate areas. It’s polished metal because it sat there for five years before they put it on this aircraft, so it had a lot of corrosion on it, and I was able to use the same techniques that I use with paint correction, just different types of polishers, pads, and compounds and polishes to really bring the depth and clarity back into this metal.
It completely changed the entire look of this aircraft. It looked absolutely gorgeous. It made this beautiful aircraft look absolutely brilliant by the time you were done with it.
In the future, when you go to clean this aircraft, is it an easier process because it’s been ceramic coated? Yeah. Not only does ceramic coating make it so much easier to keep clean, but it’s also going to prevent bird dropping etchings, bug gut etchings, and paint corrosion over time. It’s going to reduce the likelihood of that.
Something to keep in mind was this aircraft had been sitting on a runway in Cancun for like two weeks, and when it showed up, it was just covered in filth. Because it didn’t have any sort of protection on the paint, it didn’t have a sealant, it didn’t have wax, it had nothing on it, all of that filth stuck to this really, really expensive paint job. I mean, if you’re a car guy, this guy spent a Bugatti to paint this jet, and it had no protection on it.
Unfortunately, it had a lot of etchings and stains in the paint that this customer didn’t opt to correct, which is totally understandable, but just using it for a little bit already caused a ton of imperfections to arise because it sat outside. The ceramic coating is going to prevent stuff from sticking to it. I mean, it’s still going to get dirty.
You can’t prevent something from getting dirty with a ceramic coating, but that ceramic coating is going to allow substances to not stick to it. So if somebody is wanting to get their aircraft work done or their car work done, how do they get a hold of you? If you’re looking to have any of our Kansas City car detailing services before, you can give me a call at 620-282-0402, and we can walk through what goals you’re looking to achieve with our Kansas City car detailing services. And maybe you’re wanting a jet or an airplane or a boat or an RV done.
I mean, no matter what you’re wanting done, our Kansas City car detailing services have so many different packages that we can apply to whatever vehicle you’re looking to have done.