Auto Shop Cleans Cars to the Last Detail : Life Style: Starting with a Model A Ford, detailer Bill Larzelere turned his elbow grease into a full-time career.
Though some may view it as an exercise in redundancy, when Gene McCabe buys a new car, he takes it to Bill Larzelere’s auto detailing shop to be cleaned.
Larzelere is known as an ultra detailer . “A brand-new car looks like a piece of junk until Bill gets done with it,” said McCabe, owner of Gene McCabe Productions, a Burbank film company. “He does a better job cleaning cars than most people do dressing themselves.”
“We even polish the backside of the gas and clutch pedals,” said Larzelere, who opened his shop in 1975. “Car show judges look behind things, so for us it’s a matter of covering 100% of the vehicle.”
A variety of polishes and preservatives are applied to a car’s upholstery and dashboard, but Lemon Pledge furniture polish is Larzelere’s favorite. Chrome and aluminum parts are buffed with a fine-grade steel wool. A car’s underside also is cleaned, using plain soap and water.
Larzelere said his patience for such work comes from a boyhood spent watching his father fix and restore race cars and boats. “Dad was kind of a perfectionist,” Larzelere said. “Everything had to be right. There was never a compromise, never a thought of a cheaper part or an easier way to do it.”
To gain his father’s recognition, Larzelere began assembling his own cars: first a Model A Ford at the age of 14 and later a 1941 Packard. As a teen-ager, he cleaned hot rods raced by high school seniors in exchange for borrowing the cars on dates. He eventually turned his elbow grease into a full-time career, working out of his home before opening his Burbank shop.
After detailing a car’s interior, Larzelere grinds out imperfections in exterior paint surfaces with fine-grade sandpaper. “See this paint?” he asked, pressing his face against the sparkling red hood of a 1955 Jaguar XK-140. “It’s full of craters, pits and dirt. But to most people, it looks like a great paint job.”
Believing that cotton used in diapers is too rough for car surfaces, Larzelere prefers a cotton similar to that used in sanitary napkins to apply compounds, a hand glaze and, finally, carnauba wax.
The waxing and polishing process is accomplished in eight steps, using short, cross-hatch and perpendicular strokes to apply the solutions. A portable fluorescent light is used to check for imperfections along the way.
“Bill has a relationship with paint like nobody else,” said Bruce Meyer, owner of Geary’s, a seller of fine crystal, china and silver in Beverly Hills. Meyer hands over his 1930 Duesenberg and 1934 Packard to Larzelere before entering such car shows as the Concours d’Elegance held annually in Pebble Beach. “He knows exactly the right amount of pressure to apply almost by instinct,” Meyer said, adding that some car owners spend from $10,000 to $40,000 for a paint job before taking it to Larzelere for polishing.
The entire detailing process takes about 20 hours for an average car and from 30 to 150 hours for a show car. The record was a needy Ferrari Daytona Spyder convertible, which took 1,200 hours, said Larzelere, who details about 10 cars each month, charging customers from $22 to $35 an hour.
Part-time help is hired during hectic periods, and Barbara, Larzelere’s wife, does the shop’s accounting, handles job estimates for potential customers and other minute tasks, such as handpainting emblems on Porsche hubcap ornaments.
Larzelere prefers to have an unlisted telephone number since he is constantly overbooked because of customer referrals. The two-bay shop lies just beyond a faceless concrete wall, where cars in various states of assembly are scattered about--all covered with dual jackets of plastic and canvas.
Like most automotive shops, disorder is everywhere: Orphaned parts are piled up in corners, and stacks of paper work cover desks beneath framed photographs of antique cars. Three mutts, Shelby, Alice and Faith, lounge on worn carpeting, watching Larzelere as he inspects the finish on a 1973 Ferrari Daytona coupe’s alternator.
Opening several lockers packed with supplies, Larzelere reviewed the contents. Among them was an eight-ounce jar of carnauba wax, priced at $99.95. “It’s quite good,” Larzelere said, taking a whiff of the mixture, which was signed and numbered. “But it’s hard to live with at that price.”
Perfectionist car owners who frequent his shop are known as “clean freaks,” Larzelere said, admitting that the whole ball of car wax sometimes gets out of hand. A well-known Hollywood producer-director routinely inspects his car when picking it up from Larzelere, pointing out the difference between parts cleaned by Larzelere and those cleaned by the shop’s assistants. “I made the mistake of letting him look at the car when it was up on the hoist,” Larzelere said. “He saw some dirt around a bolt and said, ‘Are you slipping, or is someone else working on this?’ ”
