Hello, Kansas City, welcome back to the Bespoke Automotive Refinement Podcast. Tonight we have Thomas Thill, the founder of Bespoke Refinement, Kansas City’s number one car detailing specialist. Thank you so much for joining us and for sharing with us your huge amount of wisdom you have on Kansas City car detailing services.
Thank you so much for having me. I just love coming on here every week and talking cars, Kansas City car detailing, Kansas City ceramic coating, Kansas City paint correction. I love talking about all the things, so it’s just it’s really fun coming on here and talking about all this stuff.
Well, number one question I have for you is what’s the most jaw-jopping transformation you’ve ever done on a car? You know, there have been a few occasions where I’ve saved paint. Someone thought they may need to repaint a car. Actually, the one that comes to mind, I had a guy who had an FD3 RX-7 with a Veilside wide body kit.
It was the first one I’d ever seen in person and he actually painted the car gloss black and he had this really, I don’t know, pretty shady place to paint the car which if you know what a Veilside FD3 is, I mean that’s like a $30,000 kit to put on this car and then I think he paid like a thousand dollars for a paint job. So he brought me the car and he’s like, I don’t know if this can be saved and that was probably the most crazy before and after because it was just, it looked like it needed to be re-sprayed and I was able to restore it. I mean, I took it from, it was supposed to be black, it looked gray to a very, very, very beautiful gloss black.
That’s probably the craziest transformation. Number two, what’s the number one mistake people make when washing their own cars? Well, there’s two. The first one is using dish soap.
So a lot of people whenever they hand wash a car, you know, they think they just use any soap. So they’ll find the most available soap they have which is Dawn dish soap. Dawn dish soap strips any protectant that the car may have on it.
So if you had wax on it, if you had a sealant on it, if you have a ceramic coating on it, Dawn dish soap, well not ceramic coating, if you have ceramic sealant, Dawn dish soap strips it straight off completely. And I mean, I’ve seen a lot of, you know, just people like on walks, you know, they’ll all be out in their driveway hand washing their car on a Sunday morning and I’ll see Dawn dish soap laying there. The other mistake that people make is they use a bath towel to dry their car.
That absolutely wrecks the paint. So, you know, someone that spends six months using Dawn dish soap to wash their car and then using a bath towel to dry it, their car is going to have no protectant on it. So it’s going to start oxidizing very quickly.
And then the lack of plushness to the towel that they’re using to dry the car with will cause a lot of scratching. So those are the two big ones. Number three, how does detailing a Ferrari differ from detailing a pickup truck? Well, um, there’s two things.
So number one, Ferrari has very soft paint. As you learned. Yep.
Every time you touch one when they’re black, they scratch. Yeah. Did you pick up on that? I did.
It’s like every time you touch it, it scratches. And there’s no way to avoid that. So you have to be very delicate with drying Ferrari paint.
And, you know, no matter how delicate you are still going to scratch versus like a Dodge, Jeep, Ram, Chevy, Ford, all those brands, they use very hard paint. There’s a lot of orange peel in them. So the orange peel tends to hide scratches.
So even if you put some scratches in it, the orange peel is going to hide those defects. And then as far as interior goes, you know, there’s no interior detailer that will ruin interior pieces on a pickup truck. But when you’re detailing a Ferrari, you have to be very careful with what detailing materials that you use when cleaning a Ferrari interior, because you can, you can cause the buttons to get sticky just by detailing it.
So, you know, if you use a product that has any sort of sheep fat in it, which almost all interior detailers have to give it that, that, that shine. I mean, you’re immediately going to cause all the buttons to get to get sticky. Yeah.
So those are the two things. Number four, what’s the craziest request you’ve ever had from a client? I had a car that someone had been murdered in. Oh my gosh.
This guy bought this car from an auction. It was a, like a county auction or not a county auction. It was from a, an insurance auction and someone, the car had been shot up.
So he bought the car, fixed the fender, fixed the door, put a new windshield and all that at it. And then brings me the car. And he said, you know, he had bought the car.
So it wasn’t an insurance claim. So it wasn’t like he could, I could charge whatever I wanted, but there was a biohazard to it. And there was blood everywhere.
I mean, there was blood like in the leather, in the carpet. And I took one look at it and I was like, I don’t want to touch that. Um, it felt, uh, that felt like something that I would probably never be able to unsee if I spent an entire day cleaning out some of the blood.
Yeah. So I didn’t end up doing it. Makes sense.
Number five, what tools or products could you never live without in detailing? A pressure washer, a vacuum and microfibers. If you give me a pressure washer, a vacuum and microfibers, I can make about anything look good. I mean, I can, and, and no chemicals by the way.
I can clean a car interior. I can make a car interior look good with those three things. Okay.
No chemicals with no air compressor. Um, those three things I can make a car look like maybe unorthodox, but I can do it. Um, number seven, kind of back to what you asked earlier, but how do you keep black cars swirl free or even can you, you can, um, you can delay it, but every time you hand wash a vehicle with black paint, you’re, you’re gonna put scratches in it.
There’s just no way to avoid it. Um, I think about your dad’s truck. I mean, I hand wash it every two weeks.
Yeah. Every year that truck’s really going to need to be repolished just to get the scratches out of the coating, to rehydrate the coating, you know, do all of the things that make it look like new again. And, and, and, um, really the best way to avoid putting scratches and swirls in black paint is wash with a two bucket system.
Um, cycle your mitt out with after every panel and always make sure to, um, have some sort of lubricant on your drying towel. Mm hmm. So if somebody is wanting to get ahold of you for any Kansas city car detailing services or Kansas city car detailing needs, how would they go about doing so? The best way to get ahold of me for any Kansas city car detailing needs or services is to call 620-282-0402.
You can also go online to bespokerefinement.com and there you can check out a list of all of the different Kansas city car detailing services and packages that we have to offer the Kansas city area.