By David M. Fitzpatrick
Of The Weekly Staff
After nine years in the Army as a missile technician, Jesse Bell worked for some time as a commercial mechanic, but he knew he hadn’t found his niche.
“It never quite gave me the satisfaction that I wanted; you fix their cars, and no one really appreciates that,” he said.
But along the way, he always took care of his own cars, including washing them in car washes. He was never happy with the results.
“The drive-through ones (car washes) leave scratches and swirls all over your car,” he said. “They opened a new one with the touchless wash [in Bangor], and I started going to that twice a week, and it started to eat the clear coat off my personal car… it made me quite upset.”
Automotive painting typically is a three-layer process. The first is the primer coat; the second is the colored basecoat; and the third is the protective clearcoat. Clearcoats vary by manufacturer; some clearcoats are soft and easily damaged, while others are much harder.
The problems are twofold. First, automatic car washes with spinning brushes and flapping cloths can abrade the clearcoat, which scuffs, scratches, and removes it. The same can be said of washing your own car in the driveway and using polyester cloths or paper towels. Second, car washes that don’t actually touch a car can still damage its clearcoat with harsh chemicals. And that driveway self-wash? You’ll be using cleaning chemicals that do the same thing. And once the clearcoat is penetrated, the paint job is the next to go.
In January 2013, Bell, fed up with his personal vehicle suffering such damage, decided to educate himself. He researched cleaning methods to learn the various pros and cons and settled on what he knew was the most environmentally friendly — and car friendly — method available.
The result is Adept Auto Service Mobile Car Wash & Detailing, sort of a concierge service where Bell visits his customers on site to give them that high-tech, personal care. Bell uses two ounces of an environmentally safe fluoropolymer with just two gallons of water. The fluoropolymer is similar to Teflon; it bonds with anything that’s not painted, lubricates it, and lifts it off. Bell then mops it up with a clean sponge and dries it. He does the entire process by hand: no pressure washers, no abrasive materials.
The result: a car as clean as any car wash, using far less water and not sending harmful chemicals down storm drains or driveways. And that two gallons is much less than the average tens of gallons you’d likely use if you did it yourself with a hose.
“I finally decided I could make a business out of that,” Bell said. “No one else is doing it in 300 to 400 miles.”
That’s probably because the market for customers for that method is quite small. Bell describes what he does as a luxury service, with a significantly higher cost to do a car.
“I get a lot of … customers who are perfectly happy with the $10 drive-through car wash,” he says. “If it gets it mostly clean, that’s great. They just can’t see why they would want to spend the money to have their car professionally detailed.”
For those who value the way their vehicles look, however, his service, which he does entirely by hand, is invaluable. Cleaning a car takes as much as two hours, and he does his work at his customers’ locations, which could be a car in a driveway or a tractor trailer at a truck stop.
“When you’re doing it by hand, you get everything,” Bell said. “You can give certain areas more attention as needed, instead of a mechanical service that just blasts the car. If things are still dirty or still covered with soap [after a mechanical car wash], then that’s on you.”
He also does paint correction, swirl and hologram removal (typical results, he says from drive-through car washes), and even clear coating for better protection. And he uses a variety of waxes depending on the color of the car and the clearcoat on it.
For a business born of a desire to educate himself and make his own vehicle look great, Bell has had a great time on the job.
“I enjoy learning new things,” he said. “It’s been fun and rewarding. As opposed to being a mechanic, [where] I’m in basically a dungeon all day, working on things, I never got to see the outside. Now I’m outside every day. Nice tan — life is good.”
You can ind Adept Auto at AdeptAutoService.com or by calling 450-7436.