Hello, Kansas City! We are so glad that you joined us today for a very special Bespoke Automotive Refinement Kansas City Car Detailing Podcast, because we’re going to be talking about paint restoration Kansas City. Now, typically, we come on here and we talk about some of the top, best cars, cars that won awards, we talk about car detailing, but today we’re going to be talking about paint restoration Kansas City. We have one of the absolute best in the industry at Kansas City Car Detailing paint restoration Kansas City, and really in the entire world.
I don’t even need to narrow it down to Kansas City, because this is something that’s just a universal thing. People shipping their cars from all over to get their work done by Thomas Thill Bespoke Automotive Refinement. Thank you so much, Thomas, for joining us, and for not only sharing your wisdom, but also for having such a heart of hunger and joy about Paint Restoration Kansas City.
That’s the best intro anyone’s ever given me in my entire life. Has anybody ever said you were the best in the world? They haven’t, they should. That’s true.
They have, but it’s better coming from you. That’s true. Can you walk us through a little bit about what is Paint Restoration Kansas City? I think it means restoring paint, but what does it really actually mean? I’ll break it down.
Break it down for us. So many people have an old car, whether they inherited it, or whether they buy it, or whether it’s been sitting in their backyard for 15 years, and they’ve said, oh, I’m going to restore this thing one of these days. And they think that they have to spend $20,000 or $30,000 on a brand new paint job, because that’s just the way we think, especially as car enthusiasts.
So many times people have brought me a car saying, I’m going to get this repainted, but I want to make it look good to just hold it over until I do get it painted. And what ends up happening is they never end up getting it painted, because I’m able to make it look as good as a brand new paint job. Even a car that’s been sitting in someone’s backyard for 20 years.
My favorite one was this guy who had a red Toyota MR2. If you’re a car guy, you know what that is. And it had been sitting in his Kansas City Car Detailing backyard.
It had been sitting there for so long that there were weeds growing around it. The rim had sunk into the ground. The tires were flat.
And the paint was so oxidized that it looked pink. It didn’t even look red. And so he pulled it into his garage, or he wheeled it into his garage, took the tires off, and he’s exactly that.
He’s like, I’m going to get this thing running, and I want to just make the paint look decent until I can afford to give it a paint job. And the car didn’t have any dents in it, and it didn’t have any defects that had compromised the clear coat. It had been sitting for so long that I was able to make that car look brand new.
I was literally able to make it look like it had just left the showroom floor because all that oxidation was not—it was damage to the clear coat, but it hadn’t compromised the clear coat. So that’s the perfect representation of what Paint Restoration Kansas City is. So with an oxidized car, oxidation is when the sun hits a vehicle for so long and it’s not sitting inside.
It’s the top layer of clear coat that begins to fade, but it can 100% be restored. How often are you not able to work on a car? Like if you go to check out a car and you’re like, this is not something I can work on. One in the last year.
So typically then, if you are given a car, you are able to restore it in some function or way. 100%. Really a good rule of thumb is if the paint’s cracking, so if you see actual cracks in the paint, I can’t fix that.
Or if you can see—if there’s a sun fade mark and you can actually see the primer, I can’t fix that. But something that’s oxidized or something that’s just heavily scratched, or even if it has a ton of orange peel, we can definitely restore that with our Paint Restoration Kansas City package. Tell them a little bit about when the guy called you a couple months ago and he had tried doing his own paint correction work.
Sat it out in the sun and it just ruined the paint. And he was like, can you fix this? And you made it look better than brand new. I’m trying to remember that one.
Oh. So this guy had seen some stuff online about polishing this scratch out of his hood. So he went and bought a rubbing compound and just compounded the entire hood, which when you compound paint, you open the pores in the clear coat, and those pores can then absorb everything.
So what happened there was the UV rays were being absorbed into the pores of this clear coat, which allowed oxidation to occur very quickly, like over the course of two months. And this was a three-year-old Ram pickup. It was black.
It actually looked really bizarre. It looked like something out of a movie where the movie’s taking place 30 years from now and they’re using a modern vehicle from the day and it’s all faded. That’s what it looked like.
And so that one required wet sanding because there was a lot of clear coat on that one that had been damaged, so I had to do a lot of cutting through the clear coat on that one. But the result was the hood looked better than the rest of the truck after I was done with it. The guy literally told me, he’s like, nah, I feel like I have to have the whole truck dug because the hood looks better than the rest of the vehicle, which was the complete opposite before I started on the truck.
Any other cool stories of Paint Restoration Kansas City? Any jobs you’ve worked on where you’re like, gosh, this needs to be out in the world to see what people can really do to transform a vehicle? When you can take something like that that had some sun damage or an older vehicle or even a new one that needs a little bit of work, man oh man, can you restore that paint? I think my favorite one outside of the Bentley that I just finished was a Ferrari Testarossa. So this car was a rotisserie-built Ferrari Testarossa. Every panel, every rubber hose, every bolt had been taken out of this car and then reassembled.
And this body shop painted the car, and they did a phenomenal job painting this car. The paint was beautiful. But their finishing work, which is very typical with any body shop, even these custom paint shops, they just miss that final step of really correcting the paint and making it look proper.
And that’s not a shot that I’m taking at any body shop. That’s just I have a different level of perfection. And so that car went from a 9.5 to a 10, but it was so pronounced when you saw the before and after of that car.
And it was really cool because it was a 1980s Ferrari that just a couple years ago people were basically sitting in junkyards because they were considered really worthless. And now their collector value has started to be respected. That’s probably one of the first Testarossas to ever receive a rotisserie frame-off restoration.
So being able to be a part of that project, making it look better than a brand new one, was one of my favorites. I love that. So if somebody is needing to get a paint restoration Kansas City job done, how do they get a hold of you to learn more? The best way to get a hold of me if you’re wanting a Paint Restoration Kansas City is to give me a call at 620-282-0402.
I can walk you through things to look at on your car to know what service it’s going to need because there are so many different types of Paint Restoration Kansas City services that we offer. We offer a single-step paint correction all the way to a four-step paint correction. So many different levels of it that go into play.