Zymöl

Chuck Bennett - Founder for Zymöl

Starting out by caring for his own vehicle with homemade waxes fueled 40 years of love and passion in the world of Automobiles, Aircraft, Boats, Horses and even Musical Instruments!

Contact: Chuck Bennett at cbennett@zymol.com | 352-540-9085 | Visit Online!

            

• History of Zymöl (over 40 years in this industry); Where did the name come from?  Are you a chemist/chemical engineer?
• What types of Products does Zymöl offer?
• Zymöl in Motorsports
• Car Care – 101: “The wash is as important as the wax”
• Special techniques & Zymöl events.

and much, much more!

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Gran Touring Motorsports podcast, break Fix, where we’re always fixing the break into something motorsports related.

Sometimes it’s not the car you need, it’s the car that needs you. That’s the motto that has fueled 40 years of love and passion in the world of automobiles, aircraft, boats, horses, and even musical instruments using natural ingredients, oils and waxes, xmal products, enhance any finish without harsh chemicals or abrasives.

And with us tonight to tell the Xmal story, educate us on proper car care and recount some great stories, is the founder and c e O of Xmal, Chuck Bennett, and co-hosting with me tonight from the drive-through is Tanya. So I wanna welcome both Tanya and Chuck to the show and let’s get into it. Okay, great.

So I gotta say I have been preaching. [00:01:00] About Xmal for many, many years. I got exposed to it because we were trying products a long time ago on a car that was very difficult to wax, you know, an unclear coded red Volkswagen Audi product trying all sorts of different things, and I kind of fell in love with the whole Xmal series of products.

This is already 20 years ago and I’ve been using it ever since. So I’m really excited to do this episode with you, Chuck. So let’s start off and talk about how you got into waxes and 40 years in this industry. How did you get started? It’s interesting how I got started and how the company started. Back in the late seventies, I had gone to Germany and the idea was I had seen a movie that was on television.

It was like a mini series called Roots, and it really impressed me. It impressed me with finding your ancestry, getting in touch with where you came from. My great-grandmother, who was, by the way, disowned from her family for marrying outside of her station. She [00:02:00] married a Dane and sh, her actual, her name was, her last name was Roth Shield.

She was one of the Roth Shield ladies. Where she grew up was a place called Bishops Time, Germany. So I decided to go to Bishops Time and sort of get the feeling for where my great-grandmother came from. That’s about as far back as I could touch with our family. In Bishops Heim, it’s, it’s on the Tbo River.

It’s a wonderful, beautiful place. They’re known for a few things. One of the things they’re known for is wine. They’ve got great wines. They’re known for great food. They’re also known for restoring horse-drawn carriages. Okay? The original, like landow kind of carriage in Germany at that time, they kept up the approach and the technique of restoring a carriage with the materials that were used originally on that carriage.

As an example, wood was sanded to an almost perfection, and then it was covered with clay. That clay was sanded. Then they used an enamel paint on these beautiful horse drawn carriages. The [00:03:00] black carriages looked like light came in near it and bent around corners to get into the carriage like they were metal.

They, they were incredible. I noticed when they were done restoring these carriages, when they were done rubbing them out and doing what they were doing, That they applied this God awful product out of the side of the carriage. I will tell you right now that if I went to a football stadium and I had a container of it and I opened it up, I’d probably clear out half of the stadium the odor.

The odor was just the worst you, you possibly could imagine. Well, what it was was animal fats that had become rancid. There was lards, there was seit. It was the worst thing it could possibly smell, but the results were phenomenal. At that point, I had had a Nivea container. I always liked to do a little moisturizing.

I hate to say it, but I do. Still trying to look good at almost 75 years old. What I did was I dumped out my Nivea and I got some of their [00:04:00] product and I put it in the container. It re reminded me a lot of that liter crunch cheese. Okay. Mixed up with that fish that, that goes bad in Norway. If they want to put uh, they have a pen in a can that Fisk fish.

Yeah. Ludic Fisk. Yeah. Lud fists. Yeah. Yeah. Now the scariest part was coming back to the United States and I’m saying to myself, what happens if you know, like a dog gets a whip of this container? Cause the stuff was coming through the container and I’ve gotta open this container up and then explain to somebody that it’s not Nivea, it stinks this bad and they want me to put it on my skin.

No. So I was lucky. I went through customs. It was no problem. I got back here to the States. Being a vegetarian, by the way, I am a vegetarian. I’ve been one since I was 24 years old. This is all for myself. I was not interested in making a company. This is for myself. Being a vegetarian, I, I can’t make a product for myself that contains these animal fats.

I decided to look at different kinds of plant [00:05:00] fats that had fatty esters that were pretty close to what these animal fats were Very hard to find. I was able to find an interesting plant fat that had an L D L count, which is one of the highest that I’ve ever seen, which is carava. Carava is a super L D L, low density lipoprotein.

In its natural form, car wax is harder than a concrete block. Wow. And we can get into that later on. We can explain how that stuff works. So I had a friend of mine who was working at the time for a pharmaceutical company in New Haven, Connecticut, and she introduced me to an engineer and I sat down and I explained what I was trying to do and he said, okay, let’s see what kind of oils and plant fats can combine and maybe we can break down this carava.

And he decided that the best thing he could break the car, but down with was citric terpene. Tony, you’re familiar with terpenes? Uh, it’s [00:06:00] been a while. Been a while. Citric terpene. It’s the pressings from the skins of things like oranges and lemons and limes and tangerines. And they press the oil out and then what they do is they go ahead and they distill the oils.

So you’ve literally got an all natural solvent. Yeah. Which will help you dissolve, which will help you, uh, create an emulsion using the car and your plant oils. And this citric terpene. So we created a, if you will, a wax, in essence a wax. And I tried it out and it was terrible. Didn’t work. It was like I went ahead and rubbed Vaseline all over my car.

I said, oh Jesus, what am I gonna do? I went back to Mr. Patel and I said, we’re gonna, do we have a problem? He said, and maybe it’s because there’s no biological activity. There’s nothing that’s making this want to become a wax again. You’ve got a pomade, you don’t have a wax. You need some bioactivity in there.

He said, you know, there is an animal [00:07:00] that converts plant oils to a wax. I said, animal. Well, really what he meant was an insect. What we were able to find was the reagent through a company in Chicago called Signal. Uh, even though it was, it was synthetic cause we didn’t want to kill bees that bees use to convert plant oils to waxes.

So we applied the reagent to our mix. Still at this point, no interest in starting a company. None. This was for me. Let me tell you about my car and the reason why I wanted to do this. I had a 1977. BMW five 30 i in Topaz, gorgeous color, and I was using the Commod products that are on the market. When I waxed that car and I looked at my applicator cloth and I say, wait a minute, that’s the same color as my car.

That can’t be good. If I’m trying to wax my car, why am I all of a sudden noticing the color of my paint on my applicator clothes? And [00:08:00] it’s simple. It’s because the, the kinds of braces and the kinds of solvents that were being used, We’re doing a very nice job in dissolving my paint service. So I said, okay, I’m gonna make myself something that’s not gonna do that.

So I made the product in my kitchen. Now, the interesting part of this is, is that I belonged to the BM BMW Car Club of America. A few of the members of the BMW car Club when I would go to a monthly meeting had seen how nice my car looked, and they made comment about it and I said, well, I’ve got this sort of wax that I’ve made.

And of course everybody said, can I have some? And I started giving these products away. Well, I was giving a lot of those products away, and I was using canning jars to put the products in about a year and a half after I was doing this, it got to a point where my wife looked at me and said, we need to talk.

Okay? I just want you to know that last month you gave close to $1,500 of our money away making these [00:09:00] products. I said, how, how is that possible? You bought these raw materials, you bought two 50 cup coffee, errs as you’ve been making the products in, you’ve been buying all these canning jars. This has to stop.

She says, either you stop doing it or you sell it. So in Connecticut, uh, there was a wonderful restaurant called the, um, silver Inn, and it was located in Wallingford, Connecticut. That’s where we had B M W Car Club meeting. And I had talked to Mark Luckman at that point. He was the director of the B M BMW Car Club.

He was coming in to say hello, and he granted me, uh, 15 minutes up on in front of everybody. I got up and said, everyone, you know who I am? In a big applause. Yes, yes, yes. We know who you are. You got this great stuff. And I said, well, I can’t give it away anymore, guys. It was like somebody had gone out and keyed every one of their BMWs.

You had to see their faces. So I said, uh, well, I don’t know what to do. I, I just can’t give you these products anymore. And somebody in the [00:10:00] back, in fact, I remember his name, Rick Ovia, raises his hand and he says, uh, why don’t you sell us the product? And I’m thinking, my top, Hey, jar honey, sell you the product.

Okay, well I could do that, but I have to figure out what it’s gonna cost. So I go back and I’m trying to figure out what it’s gonna cost me to sell this product and. The scary part was, the scary part was that it was probably gonna cost me per container around 12 to $13 to make up a container of that product.

And this is in 1980s dollars, right? This is 1980s dollars. Yeah. And I said, okay, I could sell it, but I need to make a profit because I’ve gotta take some of that money and plug that back into the business so I can buy more materials. What am I gonna do to figure out what I should price this at? And at that point, I had talked to my brother and my brother says, look, he said it cost me a 12 to 13 bucks to make it you, including your labor in there.

I said, [00:11:00] no, what labor? He says, well, somebody’s gotta be making it. I said, yeah. He says, look, why don’t you price it at $19? I said, okay. He says, yeah. He says to me, he says, everybody’s got a $20 bill on their wallet, especially car guys. They’re gonna wanna buy it. I said, okay. So I contact Mark Luckman for the BMW car club, and I said, mark, I would like to advertise my product in the Roundel magazine.

And they said, okay. So I came up with an ad and the ad was the container of our product and the title of the ad was, this is the first car wax ad you should not gloss over. That’s good. I like that. Yep. I have to tell you, I had a friend of mine help me create the ad. When I talked to the people at the BM W Car Club, the money they wanted for me to do an ad in there was like insanity, right?

I said, oh Jesus, what am I gonna do? So my brother said, why don’t you contact the Mercedes-Benz Club and see what they charge for advertising [00:12:00] in the STAR magazine? I said, okay. So I contacted the store magazine and they said, yeah, well let’s place the ad. It’s gonna be $800 if you do it in color and if you do it in black and white, it’s 350.

I said, well, I’ll do it in black and white. So it was a great ad and it had a little coupon thing at the bottom where someone could cut that out and, and do a coupon and had an address. I had to get a post office box. So I went down to Branford, Connecticut and got post office box seven 20 little post office box, right?

So the ad ran nothing. I don’t hear anything. I’m not getting any letters coming in. Nothing. I go to the post office box like every other day. I hear crickets and his moths have come flying out of it. I said, okay. This was one of those ventures on my part that I’m gonna stick to what I was doing. And by the way, what I was doing at that point for a living is that I was a computer hardware engineer that was working [00:13:00] for a whole bunch of different companies, helping those companies move.

Computer engineering into robotics. That was my job. Wife still couldn’t figure out what the hell am I doing playing with this stuff? So I get a phone call at my office. At that point, I was working for Wang Labs, wonder Dunno if anybody knows who Wang Labs was up in Lowell, mass. I, I worked for a derivative of Wang, so I I I’m with you.

Okay. No kidding. In fact, my office was down the hall from Fred Wang, who’s Dr. Wang’s son, right? Mm-hmm. I get a phone call. The phone call is from the postmaster in Branford, and he says to me, I’m gonna try and do the voice. He says, Mr. Bennett, I says, yeah. He says, I need to see you in my office tomorrow. I said, oh, Jesus.

Y y yes sir. Uh, can you tell me what’s wrong? I says, no, I’ll talk to you when you get here. I called the wife and I said, listen, uh, I don’t know what I, you know, maybe there’s some, some laws that I’ve broken by [00:14:00] advertising product in a magazine, or maybe I need to have a federal license to do this stuff.

Or maybe the Federal Trade Commission doesn’t like the fact that everybody else has wax on the market. It’s like, Two hours a container, and here I am at 19, obviously something’s wrong. So I get up that morning, I had a cup of coffee and it was like shaking all over the place. Get in the car and I drive down there.

I walk in, there’s like a window, right? Knock on the, on the, on the little shelf. On the, on the window and it opens up. And I said, I’m here to see. I don’t remember what the postmaster’s name is, but I’m here to see him. He says, hang on. So I said, okay. Next thing I know, the window opens up. And there’s bags, mail bags being thrown at me through the window.

There’s about six mailbags. Whoa. And the postmaster pieces his head out and he says, it really aggravates me when people get a small post office box and they know they’re going to get this kind of reception coming in the door from [00:15:00] doing some marketing or advertising. He said, you need a bigger post office box, Mr.

Bennett. I said, what is all this? He said, it’s a response to whatever you’ve done. So here I am. I’m down there. It’s in the morning. I’m trying to carry out these bags and get them into the car. It wouldn’t all fit in the trunk. They got some in the back seat. I drive home. The wife at that point was working.

I call her up and I said, yeah, you need to come home. We got a situation. She said, okay. She comes home, we open up the bags and it was orders. There were orders after orders after orders. There were people that were sending not only checks, but they were sending cash. Wow. And little notes to say like, here’s a $20 bill.

Keep the dollar for the future. Thank you. And this is crazy. Our first ad ended about $40,000 in sales. Whoa. So I sat back at that point and I said, wow, let me see. Computers that make me crazy, [00:16:00] right? Spending my life trying to figure out what operating system failure is going to, is going to determine what my life is like over the next.

30, 60 days or maybe doing this. I decided at that point to get ahold of a couple of really great people, some engineers that were in the packaging business. You know, I decided I was going to go ahead and rent a garage and I’d move manufacturing from my kitchen into a garage. And I did. We started manufacturing product.

I designed a container, which is the xmal wax container that’s patented, by the way. It’s a patented container. No, and there’s, there’s all kinds of. Strange things about that container. We’ll tell you, tell you about as well. But the company has grown from this. I’m working in my kitchen to, uh, a worldwide company.

I mean, we sell in just about every single country on the planet, except for [00:17:00] ones we can’t sell to. I wish I could, like Cuba. There’s a few Asian countries I like to sell to, one of which is, uh, got this little guy who’s got a funny haircut. He’s got lots of nice cars. I’d like to sell everywhere. I’d like to be.

I have people take care of their cars, love their cars. And you’re right, it’s sometimes it’s not the car that you need. In most cases it’s the car that needs you. And there are lots of people who have got wonderful cars. There’s people that have got 1970, you know, seventies pintos in the garage that they’re massaging, that they love.

Why would anybody own one? Why? Because they love the car. There’s all kinds of. Wonderful automobiles in the hands of wonderful people that need to keep the dream alive. That’s our goal, helping people keep the dream alive. We’ve done some pretty incredible things. We’ve branched out and created some other products.

One of the hottest products that we’ve got. Is our HD cleanse. I don’t know if you’ve ever used HG Cleanse. I, I, I [00:18:00] own it. I, I have an assortment of Mol products, HD cleanse along HD cleans is like an exfoliate for paint. And the interesting thing about HD cleans is it removes hairline scratches in paint.

And the more you use it, the more hairline scratches are going to be relieved from the paint without a braiding the paint. You’re not using a polishing agent that can strip clear coat or strip paint off a car. And especially today when the average paint on a car today is anywhere between four to six mils, that’s all there is.

So you’ve gotta be very careful what you use on, on a car today. The older cars, they’ve got 20, 30 mil space. You can scrub like crazy with those cars, but you still have to be gentle with pain. Waxing a car, treating the finish of a car is very much like either baking or it’s like making love or it’s any of those things.

You’ve gotta be gentle, you’ve gotta have a little finesse. You’ve gotta work, you’ve gotta be mentally in tune [00:19:00] with the automobile and you’ve gotta care about it because it, you’re responsible for it. So HD Cleanse became a instant hit with people that wanted to resurrect their paint and get their paint to a point where they could apply O wax to it.

Because for years, people had believed that all they had to do was wash a car and wax it. That doesn’t work. We’ll get into that in a little bit, but Chuck, I, I gotta pause you here because wow, I think this is the most epic origin story we’ve ever had on Break Fixx. So I want people to kind of digest everything you’ve said, but there’s some important fallout here.

Number one, I made a really interesting connection. Finally, I understand why Xmal has been the number one recommended wax for BM W in the B M W Club. I never realized that until now. But also, I think a question falls out of this. Where did the name come from? Oh, well, I was sitting there and trying to come up with a name.

You know, there’s all kinds of of things that, that were in my head, regal wax and just stupid, stupid [00:20:00] things. I like names that sort of name what the product is that sort of tell you what it does. Now the waxes we make are enzymatic alions. They’re ziems, they have a reagent in them. It’s like beer, it’s like sourdough bread.

There’s, there’s a live culture inside those containers. You know, that culture gets added after we blend everything and we’ve got the temperature to drop in those containers and that’s when we add the culture to it. So enzymatic Ayaan, so I’m looking at this word, it’s two words actually. I said enzymatically, Mayan, there’s a Zion there and it’s oil.

We’ve got plant oils. What’s the German word for oil? O with an umla. L o e L is a German word for oil. Zyme oil. Put the two of ’em together. Zy that created Al, and I’ve got the original press type lettering. You know what press type lettering was back in the seventies and in the eighties where these letters, you could buy sheets and you put the sheet down on a piece of paper and you’d rub it and it would transfer the [00:21:00] letter onto the sheet you’re working with.

I have the original press type lettering of the logo xmal, and the only thing that’s changed since then was the original logo was just the word and now the logo is the word with double rules. Two rules above. Two rules below. That’s the Zy logo. That’s where the name came from. It is an explanation of what the product is.

An enzymatic al coming out of the computer and computer hardware world. Now you’re a chemist, chemical engineer. What do you consider yourself after 40 years of doing this? A frustrated entrepreneurial scientist who has absolutely made every possible mistake that you could make. Right? All I can tell you is, is that if my mistakes were cow manure, you’d have no place to walk.

Cause I made every possible mistake you could make. There was mistakes in packaging, mistakes in blending, mistakes in raw materials that we bought. It was really crazy. And one of the things that I [00:22:00] was able to do is to solicit help from the vendors that supplied. Me raw materials, people that supplied me, coconut oil, people that supplied me, carava, people that supplied me.

Things like banana oil. A lot of these companies have got biochemists that work for them, and you can get a lot of help from these companies because they have those people working there. And of course, the more help they give you, the more that they can get their product embedded inside yours, carava, as an example.

Car comes from a palm tree called the Copernicus syrup. That palm tree grows in three places in the world, actually four now. It grows in Brazil. Brazilians are well known for their car. It grows in Egypt, it grows in Africa, but it grows in, uh, in South Africa, and it grows in Brooksville, Florida. You were equatorial until that point.

Yeah. We have our own carava orchard. We [00:23:00] our own Is that specifically Formo? You have your own orchard. We have our own carava plants. We treat them differently than everybody else. Let’s go back to Carava from the world. Brazilian car is used in almost everything it’s used in. Candies, cosmetics, it’s used everywhere.

If you’re have, you’ve ever eaten an m&m, if you’ve eaten a tic tac, they contain car. In fact, you can look at the package and it says it right out. That’s what gives it the glossy, quote unquote, candy coating, right to keep. Well, it’s what? It’s, it’s, it’s the binder that binds the sugar together. Remember that when you mix low density lipoproteins or even high density lipoproteins with sugar, you, you get some monstrous triglycerides.

If you’ve got too much in your body, it’s a bad thing. If you’ve got too much, if your tri, if your triglyceride level is too high, There’s a good chance your cholesterol level is gonna be totally outta whack. Yep. They use that in Egypt. They use the carava there to wax thread. Okay. They wax thread in Egypt because when they’re making wonderful cotton [00:24:00] sheets and all those things, they need to wax the thread so it doesn’t get burned out while it’s in the loom.

It has to flow smoothly through the loom, so they wax the threading with the carava. In South Africa, they use the carava for jewelry molds. It melts at about 180 degrees, and it’s very solid once it becomes, because it, it gets back down to, to ambient room temperature. And in our carava here in Florida, we actually treat the plants like maple trees and we sap them.

We don’t. Interesting. We don’t take, we don’t take the car. From the fronds. Now the rest of the world takes the car alpha from the fronds. They send person up to the tree and they take the fronds off and they drop them down. Somebody down below chops them all up, puts ’em in a 55 gallon tank of warm ether.

And what happens is all the fats come to the top, they pour the fats off onto a mold, which is sitting on the ground and the dirt, they pour the fats off onto that, it hardens up. They take the bricks and they ship them up. There’s a [00:25:00] few companies that you can get CARNA from. The leading, uh, carna purveyor in the United States is a company called Coster Cuan.

And Coster Cuan is located in two different locations. Uh, well three there is, they’ve got one in Holland. They’ve got one in Saville, New York and they’ve got one in Connecticut. They have the ability to process car now, and I’ve been in a plant where they processed car now, so you have to use a steam turbine to do it.

And they drop these bricks into this one and a half ton bladed system that spins at about 26,000 R P M. In an explosion proof room, and what happens is it chops the carava up and the carava, uh, comes a powder and it floats inside the vessel and they suck the powder off while the dirt and sand and everything else and insects fall to the bottom.

Wow. That’s how they process carava. There’s different types of carava. There’s brown Carava, which is brown card Alba, which is from the oldest of the Franz. There’s yellow carava and then there’s different grades of yellow carava and [00:26:00] there’s white carava. And white carava is the most expensive because it comes from the upper front.

Carava back in the eighties was going for around $15 a pound. Today it’s in the neighborhood of about $150 a pound. It’s pretty expensive materials, and it’s very hard to get that because if you’re getting Brazilian carava, it’s coming in by boat. We all know what the supply chain crisis looks like. It’s pretty crazy trying to get raw materials today.

It’s one of the biggest challenges that my team has is getting raw materials. So we use carava in almost everything we make. It is the wax of choice, and we’ve gone from using micro fine carava to today’s marketplace where we use nano fine. Car. And on top of that we use Kaba, sap, and Kaba. SAP is one of the materials that’s in, uh, as an example, a product that we make called Field Glaze.

Field Glaze is used every day. It’s uses the Aston Martin factory [00:27:00] every single day. They shoot the cars with field glaze as they’re moving them from one section of the factory to the next, just to prevent scratches from happening and abrasions of the paint. Also, our spray glaze is using liquid car.

We’ve gone through different suppliers of car, but we’re sticking with the guys that we know. Make the best of the products that are out there, raw materials that are out there. As the company progressed, we got tapped on the shoulder by lots of people who wanted us to help them in their endeavors to win at different events all over the world.

So, Chuck, you know, you alluded to a bunch of things as you were describing, you know, the origin of the company talking about natural products, you know, we talked about carnauba wax and things like that. So I’ve noticed, and I appreciate and I kind of show off to other folks, Hey, check out smell. You gotta smell this, right?

Especially the cleaner wax. You smell that coconut, you smell the banana. The wheel wax has mint in it. Like it’s very prominent, the [00:28:00] natural ingredients that are in Zy Immo. You don’t find that in pretty much anything else. But I’ve also come to realize in talking to you outside of the show, that Zy Immo offers products not just for cars.

So do you wanna elaborate on that and how you got into developing products for not just cars? First, let’s talk, go back and talk about the aromas. You know, we’ve gotten complaints about the aromas. What? Yep. One of the most pungent smells is banana toast, ols. They are very, very strong. We use the oil from something called the Burrow banana.

The Bur bananas, a three-sided banana. It’s a short fat banana. If I were to open one up in my factory, just open a banana up in my factory. In fact, we had a young lady who was allergic to bananas that worked for us and we had to let her go home and spend the day at home, and we were making products that contained banana oil.

This stuff is just mind blowing how strong it’s, but we’ve gotten actually complaints from people that said, I hate that smell. [00:29:00] I mean, there are a lot of people that don’t like the smell of coconut, they don’t like the smell of bananas. We use spearin oil. In our wheel cleaner. Yep. They don’t like the smell of spear metal.

We’ve had that happen. Let’s go and talk about, one of the things that I think is, is really fun is musical instruments, which turned out to be a bit of a disaster. My son, who’s a very, very good bass player, calls me up one day as his dad. He gotta go on, I think it was either the Grecia Rickenbacker website.

He says, there’s a bunch of guys on that site that are talking about using your cleaner wax on their guitars and their bases. He says, and they’re all excited about it. I said, not good. What do you mean not good? I said, the wax matrix in our cleaner wax is too heavy. If you have an acoustic instrument and you’re putting that wax on an acoustic instrument, you’re insulating the tonality of the wood.

You are taking that wood and you’re dampening it by putting wax on it. He says, well, some of these are solid bodies. Well, the salad [00:30:00] bodies. That that is not my, not my worry. I said your hollow bodies and your semi hollow bodies. That’s my worry. I log into that website. It’s a like a factory website. Tell people who I am.

Got a whole bunch of responses from people that said, wow, you’re, you’re. Really? Do you play? Yeah, I play it, play bass, all that stuff. And I said, well, why you, why did you get on board? What prompted you get on board? I said, it was very, very upfront. I says, because I want you to stop using my cleaner wax on your instruments.

Boom, that tight. Why? And I explained, And of course I got like, Rick, why don’t you sell us the product? I got one guy who sent me up a sent a message to me that said, why don’t you create some products for musical instruments? And I said, wow, that’s a whole different animal. That’s a different kind of wax matrix.

I contacted my son, I said, would you be willing to let me send you some products and he could test it on your collection? He says, not a problem. Dad says, I’ve got some instruments here. I didn’t have a collection this big up at the time, and I said, we’ll, test it out. [00:31:00] So over the course of about 18 months, we created product, tested it, threw it away.

Just finally got ourselves to a point where we were able to create. Some very interesting products. We decided to do a show that’s called the Nam Show, n a M m, and the Nam Show happens in, uh, Anaheim, California during January and then in July it happens in Nashville. One in Nashville’s called the Qatar Show.

The one in Anaheim is the big major Nam show, and the NAM stands for a National Association of mu music Merchants. It’s a misnomer because it’s international. So sort of like SEMA for the car guys. Right? Right. So I’m at the Nam show and I’m displaying some of our products, talking to people about them.

We had a booth, we had. Four 50 inch screens. We did some videos. We’re gonna do it. We’re gonna do it right. I felt somebody tapping me on the shoulder and I turn around and it was Christopher Martin from Martin Guitar Company, and Chris says to me, he says, I just want to tell you. He says, I’ve been using earwax on my [00:32:00] portion.

Forever. He says, and I love your product. He says, what is this? I explained the situation that we’ve gotten involved in creating products from musical instruments. What I can tell you now is there isn’t a single guitar that leaves the Martin factory that doesn’t have xmo all over it. Wow. They use our products on their fretboard.

They use our products on the body of the guitar. Even some of our products are used to polish the finish on the guitar. I gotta tell you about the motorcycle world. Oh right. Two-wheeled friends. Yeah. Got two-wheeled friends. Remember I mentioned Bob Sinclair? He did, and actually I was gonna lead into that because we gotta talk about motor motorsport at some time.

Okay. Bob Sinclair was the avid Motorsport king, if you will. He was a crazy, crazy guy. I’ve spent hours with Bob Sinclair and Mario Owen Andretti and all these guys, all these race car drivers. We’ve been out to Baja Cantina out in California, 2:00 AM in the morning drinking negro medals and getting totally [00:33:00] toasted great, great times right after a a pebble event that Bob was out there, which happens in August.

Then we go back home and the fall sets in and the winter sets in, and Bob lived in Connecticut as well. Bob was the, the c e o for Sob SOB cars, you know, mid-November, and Bob calls me up and he says, Bennett, we’re going to Milwaukee. I says, when do you wanna go? He says, tomorrow it’s snowing to beat the band out in Milwaukee.

I said, it’s colder than Connecticut. They’ve got dogs frozen. The fire hydrants out there. I don’t wanna go to Milwaukee. He says, we’re going to Milwaukee. I said, okay. I said, what are we going, what are we gonna do Milwaukee? He goes, we’re going out to see a friend of mine, Willie G. Davis. He said, we’re going out to see Clive Fessler.

You’re going out to see the guys that run Harley Davidson. I says, okay, you still have that wax? He says to me, that rebels gasoline, right? I says, yeah, I, I gave you something, Bob. He says, yeah, I used it. It’s incredible. They were going out to show it to him. He says, make sure you bring something. I’ve already taken care of the flight.

He says, you gotta meet me. He says, at the Hartford Airport, gonna meet me there. He says, it’s about [00:34:00] nine o’clock in the morning. He called me at eight o’clock at night. Now I gotta go back down to the shop. I gotta get some product, get a whole kit together. Sure enough, we get on a plane, go out to Milwaukee, and we meet everybody.

I meet Willie G and I meet cl Fessler. The guy said, you’ve got a waxer. He sells gasoline, right? I said, yeah. He says, we’re gonna test it. We go out on a loading dock and I’m freezing my butt off, and they bring out a brand new black full dresser, and he says, wax that tank. I said, well, I better do it quick.

I said, does a temperature out here is he’s, no, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s okay. He says, it’s, he said, it is about 26 degrees. We’re good. The paint was fresh. I take the wax and I rubbed it in between my hands to get the car soft enough, and I rub this wax all over the tank. He says, what are you gonna do now? I said, well, I’m gonna wait a few minutes and then I’m gonna buff it.

Ok. So I waited a few minutes. It was a little tough, but I was able to buff it. The tank looked beautiful. He says, okay, we’re gonna get it. The test. So other guy comes out with a bucket of [00:35:00] gasoline and a rag in it. Rag in the bucket. Willie G takes the rag, drapes it over the tank. It’s gasolines like pouring out of this rag outta the ground, out of the floating dock.

He said, let’s go to lunch. I’m standing there and I could feel the blood draining out of my head. Let’s go to lunch. We’re gonna leave this rag opened in gasoline on the tank. Let’s go to lunch. We go to lunch Now, I didn’t eat a damn thing. We go back, Willie G takes the rag off. It’s still damn, and the tank is cloudy.

He says, well, he says, that looks like a problem. And I knew exactly what had happened. The carava in the wax is hydroscopic. It loves moisture. As the gasoline evaporated, the moisture in the air was getting to the car. So I said, leave it alone. What do you mean? He says, don’t touch it. So he stood there and watched it and all of the cloudiness went away.

It was bright and beautiful and deep black. Willie G looks at me and says, so, wow. He said, I want 10,000 kits delivered. He says to us, within the next [00:36:00] 90 days, so Bob and I get back on the airplane. I says, Bob, I haven’t got any way making 10,000 kids What he says, that was what Willie G said. They turn it over to Clive Fessler.

Clive Fessler gets all the engineering people, all the art design people, the label people involved. He says, you’re not gonna have to ship him anything, he says for a year. He says, don’t worry. So Harley Davidson, uh, sold our Xmal Talon was the name of the product, T A L O N. Of course, we couldn’t sell it, we weren’t allowed to sell it.

And just recently we’ve gotten a release from that exclusive. That we can now sell the Talon product. So it’s a wax that repels gas. So this actually leads into another great story, but I wanna preface this with something really, really important. Oftentimes as I try to instill in people, Hey, you should try imo, you should do this.

I always get the, it’s so difficult to work with this and that, and I have to explain people. First of all, you should really read the directions. And number two, you basically brought up a good point, which [00:37:00] was it needs to react with the environment, with the ambient temperature has to be the right temperature to work with.

It needs a lot of oxygen. It reacts to that. And that curing process is super important to the wax itself, especially the cleaner wax and, and the carbon and some of the other ones. And we’ll probably expand upon that more when we talk about car care stuff. But I think it’s, it’s funny the way you described this and it’s all based upon the way you built it in our other talks, that it’s not just oxygen that reacts with the wax.

There’s another one of these specialty products that you came up with, which is very different and it relates a hundred percent to the motorsport world. So do we wanna, do we wanna talk about, we’re talking about, we’re talking about fast. That’s right. Do you wanna explain what fast means first before people get, like, what are we talking about?

Friction augmenting surface technology. Bob Sinclair, again had contacted me and said, listen, I’ve got some friends of mine. One of them is named Bob Snodgrass, and he runs this race team called Brumos Racing. He said, never heard of, never heard of him. And he said, [00:38:00] I hadn’t heard of him. And he said, listen.

He said, uh, they really need something to help them go faster. I said, well, what are they driving? He said, you serious? I said, yeah. What are they driving? They drive Porsches to Chuck. They drive Porsches. Okay. So he said, what can you do to re reduce the coefficiency of drag on the cars? Well, you know, we use different reagents.

The reagents that we use. Really reacts with oxygen. There are different kinds of materials that react to carbon dioxide and react to water. He said, okay. He said, well, why don’t you come up with a product? He says, we’re going out to this place called Delmar out in California, and he always did this to me.

He would talk to me on a Thursday and say, we’re leaving tomorrow on a Friday. I said, well, when we go? I said, not on, nevermind Bob. What time do I have to be at the airport tomorrow? He says, well, we’re gonna head out to California tomorrow. He says, probably fly out somewhere about 9, 9 30, 10 o’clock. So we fly out to California, go to the Delmar Raceway, and that’s where I meet Hanuk and Hurley Hay.

Two of my heroes. We go out [00:39:00] there and Hanuk, you know, he’s, he’s like, lurch. Do you ever meet Hanuk? Not in person though. The guy’s like six 10. He’s like, how he can fit into that portion, but’s beyond me. In fact, uh, he’s had them modify the Porsche. We’re able to take the seat and move the seat back far enough that he could get his legs stretched out.

At that point, he says, my leg is in comfortable position to have the gas pedal all the way to the floor. So I said to Hans, I says, Hans, what about the brake? He says, what’s that? That’s awesome pedal. Nevermind, Hans. I got, I got the picture. We took this product. Now we’re there. We had gotten some containers of co2.

We put the wax on the cars and we shot the cars with co2. We shot ’em to a point where we ended up with ice forming on the outside of the cars. That alone psyched up everybody or psyched out. Everybody that was standing around the competition wanted to know what we were working on. In fact, one of the officials came [00:40:00] over and said, what are you guys doing?

Just preparing the surface for racing. As I told Hans, I says, Hans, we’ve waxed parts of the car that we should wax, and there are parts of the car that you need to have dragged. You need some down force in certain areas. We’ve got it nailed down. I said, but be careful because the car is not gonna feel like it’s going through the wind anymore.

You’re not going to get the resistance that the car normally feels. That day that we were out there was time trials and stuff. Hans takes his car out times, has about four laps, and he comes back. He jumps out of the car. God’s honest, his truth runs over to me. Grabs me and picks me up like I’m a, I’m a sack of potatoes, and he’s hugging me and he says, this is fabulous.

He says, this is just fabulous. I said, okay, Hans. I said, I, I guess you’ll like it. He says, oh, he says, I’m never gonna ride. Just drive a car again. Without your product on the car. So Bruno’s team used our product. Then at that point, Bob [00:41:00] Snodgrass knew one of the people from the America’s Cup, and we sent our guys to put Fast America’s Cup racer.

We got the pictures of it when it was that Rock Rockefeller Center. It was on display at Rockefeller Center in New York. So we put our wax on that. We have different boat race teams that abuse it. Did you ever hear of Sutfin Marine? Sutfin Marine? They’re powerboat racers. I don’t know if they still race at all, but they wouldn’t drop their boat in the water without simul fast being on the boat.

The interesting part of it is, is that the wax, when it gets near water, it’ll cause a bubbling effect in the water, so you’ve got less drag on the water. Really interesting stuff. We got caught putting this product on the America’s team boat and they told us that we had to remove it. So I built a wash and the wash contained more fast and they just washed it right and added more fast to it.

Now I get a call from B M W and they said, we need you to come to Rotana. It was the petite lamonts, [00:42:00] so we need to have you apply fast cuz he had heard about it to our cars. Me and a good friend of mine, Marty Ss, he’s, he’s a, a great guy. He’s a terrible lawyer and a wonderful Motorhead. We go out coat the cars, you know, wearing our jumpsuits.

We’ve got tanks on our back, we shoot the cars. I kept telling the guy from B BMW, I need to talk to your drivers. I need to talk to them. And I finally got a chance to talk to ’em. And you know, the funny thing about race drivers is that some of them will listen and some of them don’t talk to me. You’re an engineering low life, please don’t talk to me.

So, so I went ahead and I said, guys, these cars are not going to react the way you have had them react before. It’s a coefficiency of drag is. Severely reduced. That kind of feeling you’ve got when you are up against the air and you’re in a turn is not gonna be the same. They didn’t listen. They didn’t make it to the third turn.

Both of ’em went into the wall. [00:43:00] We had other people try this technology. Do you guys still make fast? We still make fast. In fact, one of the things that we did, we took fast and we packaged it small and gave it to the US ski team. Ooh. To try it out on their skis. I’ve been wondering about skis this whole time.

All right, here’s the best part of this. One of the people of the US ski team decided to wax one ski with our fast technology product. That sounds like a terrible idea. We went down a hill and immediately corkscrew into a tree. I don’t think I should probably sell this stuff. We did. We haven’t sold it because what happened was, The report came back somehow.

One of our attorneys, Paul bailing, is his name, uh, he’s now living in Germany. He’s, uh, he’s got a, a great life there. I love doing his voice. He said, uh, Chuck, now you can’t sell this stuff. He said, you’re gonna kill people. I said, if people are brave enough to put wooden boards on [00:44:00] their feet and go down a mountain full of ice, I mean, how, how am I, how is what I’m doing gonna kill them?

You can’t do it. Liability. Liability. You should never listen to lawyers. I probably should have taken the stuff out and sold it and then we may do it again. Anyway, we may, we may bring out that ski wax. Anyway, it’s awesome. We’ve supplied the US Olympic luge team with, uh, some of our fast technology years and years ago, and of course our logos appeared on all these.

Our logos appeared on the Brumos race cars. The logos were on the, uh, Shan Marine. Then my wife is an avid horse lover, and we woke up one morning and she said, you know, we make all these great products. Why don’t we make something for the horses? So you’re talking saddle waxes and, and other things, right?

Oh, we, we already had those products. We already had leather cleaners, leather conditioners. She was more interested in hoof care. Oh, she was interested in shampoos. She was [00:45:00] interested in conditioners, coat conditioners, main and tail detanglers, those kinds of things. So I said, yeah, we could look at that. I said, what’s the main goal here?

She says, we need to stop flies from getting at them. We had moved to Florida in 2009. There’s a big difference between the fly community in Florida and the fly community up in Connecticut down here. The flies got their own council. The state park, the state bird, they park themselves on horses here. I mean, it is crazy.

And then of course you’ve got cows everywhere. Cows breed flies. It’s, it’s incredible. We found out very quickly that we couldn’t actually make any products that would repel flies. You know, there are some products that will, we’ve got a natural extract from chrysanthemums in our soap or horses. If you take the extract from Chrysanthemum and you go ahead and process it by squeezing out the essence of, uh, in the [00:46:00] chrysanthemums, and then go ahead and distill that, you end up with something called pyrethrins when the majority of pyrethrins are garant and the flowers of Crisantos.

And what they’re for is that they cause. Insects to stop breathing. It’s a very interesting material. It causes the insect to literally suffocate, but we don’t have pyrethroids, but we do have extract of peran in our shampoo and in our conditioner. So we created some products and they’re very, very popular.

The horse care people love our products. And what’s interesting about that marketplace is that, you know, when somebody waxes their car, you know, the car doesn’t decide that it, that after it’s done getting waxed, it wants to roll over on, on its back in the nearest mud button, which is what our horse will do.

And we’ve tried our products on different horses and different parts of the world. In fact, we brought some product with us to London. We brought some products to. They tried it on some of the, the [00:47:00] Bobby’s police horses and then we brought it over to Ireland to um, uh, Ben and breakfast there called Putin Hill.

And they had a great stable and we tried some of our products on, on their horses. And then everybody was very, very pleased. We’re doing very well with our. Our horse care products, our horse care products are called Equin Skies. Oh, interesting. Yeah. It’s uh, in fact, we’ve just been notified by Amazon.

They’d like us to put a store up on Amazon of our horse care products. We’re trying to keep up with all the different dirty and need to be shiny, shiny surfaces on the planet. I’ll never be able to go after all of them. Which is actually a great segue into talking about some car care. And I know you’ve got some interesting techniques, which we’ll we’ll get into.

But I wanna start with a quote you gave me when we were talking before the show, which is the wash is as important as the wax. Let’s start with that idea and build from there. Why is the wash as important and as the wax and what’s the best or proper way to really wash a car [00:48:00] when you’re prepping it for, you know, a car show or even just for yourself or, or you know, just getting it ready, getting it shined up.

We were sponsor of the two thousands. It’s either 13 or 15 Ferrari national events here in the United States. We were the sponsors. I’m always, we have an event that we’ve always done at different events like Porsche Parade, at the bmw octoberfest. Anytime we’ve gone to a car club, We’ve done an event, star Fest.

There’s an event that we’ve always done, which I know Tanya would love. It’s called Suds and Sugar. And what it is is that we have a demonstration and hopefully they’ve got their kids with them. We teach people how to wash their car properly, and we have a company come in and make ice cream sundaes for everybody.

I’m, I’m taking this. Yeah. So everyone’s sitting there with these big, I mean, big ice cream sundaes, right? They’re watching what’s going on, and the reason why I like the whole idea, Of the ice cream sundae is that I wanna kick everybody’s endorphins through the roof. Got put in that elbow [00:49:00] grease, right?

Yeah. I want them to, I want them to see, to be, you know, right there with us when we’re working on the car. The first thing that people should realize when they wash a car is it has to be a top down effect. You always start from the top of the car and work down and you need to be able to wash your car with a good sponge, not the kind of sponge that like a sea sponge, which traps dead sea animals and shells of it, which will put all kinds of interesting patterns on your car that within.

A few thousand years when they find that body panel, they’ll try and figure out what you were trying to write. Right? Okay. So you want to have a closed cell sponge that holds a lot of water and a lot of subs. You need a good car wash product that doesn’t try and shine the car at the same time. The products that are out there that try and shine a car at the same time, generally have anywhere between a 20000 cent of stoke to a 50000 cent of stoke silicone blended into the soap.

You don’t [00:50:00] need to have, be putting that on your car. That’s not what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to. Wash the car. You need to have a five gallon bucket. That bucket needs to be filled with lukewarm water. Lots of good soap in there. A good soap. If you can’t buy a good car wash soap, then what you need to do is you need to get some ivory soap in the bar form.

You need to take that ivory soap in the bar form and you need to find a way to grind it all up and use some of that soap with a couple tablespoons of salad oil in the wash water. Interesting, so cheese grater and some olive oil. Here we’re making some olive oil. Ivory just came out recently a liquid form of ivory soap.

I know we’ve got it, but it’s not the original ivory. The original ivory soap is tallow based. Tallow is animal fats. That’s why the ivory bar would float 99 100 oh 100% pure. That’s why the ivory bar would float in water is that it was pure talo and they got it to [00:51:00] become a soap by using lie in the mix with the talo, the liquid ivory.

In fact, I’ve got some here in the house. I happen to like it a lot. I shower with it, but it’s not the original tell, so, so you shave it, you take your salad oil and you drop some salad oil in the wash water. It may be advisable no matter what you’re using for a car wash to take a tablespoon of salad oil and put it in your wash water.

Would you recommend that even for the XMO auto wash as well? I would. I would. And, and the reason why? It breaks up into millions of tiny beadlets that adhere to the silt on the car and help you slide it off the car instead of you dragging it off the car. So I’ve heard the same thing from detailers saying that if you use the old Tide powder detergent, it does the same thing.

It’s supposed to lift and shift the dirt, but it’s a bit of a clarifier. It strips the pain. No tide should be used as a silicone cracker to get silicone or sealant paint sealants off the car. In fact, I went ahead and answered [00:52:00] it to the young fella today who wanted to know how to get the sealant. He had gotten one of these ceramic sealants, which really aren’t ceramic.

I had it done to his car and now he’s got, you know what he calls COB webbing all over the car. I told him, I said, you need to first things first, you need to get that seal off the car. You go to your laundromat and buy a couple boxes of Tide. Soap in the laundromat, the small boxes. You take the two boxes, mix them in a five gallon bale of water and wash the car with tide.

Tide is extremely strong and it has a lot of phosphates, so, and it’ll crack silicone. We’ll get it off the car, but let’s go back to using a regular car wash. Try and get a good car wash. We make a good car wash. There are lots of companies that make good car washes. Love the smell of it. By the way, it’s fantastic.

It has coconut oil, it has, uh, banana oil in it. We’ve gone ahead and tried to, to create a product that’s pleasing to use and that doesn’t dry out your hands to a point where you feel like you’ve gotta moisturize your hands for the next three weeks. There’s a lot of car washes that’ll do that too. It’s the [00:53:00] pH of our carwash is somewhere around.

A six and a half considering that your water in most towns, most cities is anywhere near an eight, is on the, on the scale of the PCO is a little bit on the alkaline side. You’re gonna balance that out and hopefully get you close to a seven. All right, so now we’ve got the salad oil on there. Next thing you should do is that you need to wash the car with both hands.

One hand empty, one hand with the sponge. You take your soap water, you squeeze it off onto the top of the car or a fender if you’ve moved to that part or a hood, and use your bare hand and you run your bare hand over the car first. Don’t touch the car with the sponge. Use your bare hand. What you wanna find is things stuck to the paint.

That bug protein is a wonderful glue for taking a small stone and gluing it to your top of your car or a fender on your car. And there you go, giving archeologists a time again trying to [00:54:00] figure out what the hell you wrote on your car. 2000 years ago. Cause you’ve scraped this stone again all over your car.

So hand first. Hand first. Once you are satisfied, there’s nothing stuck to the paint. Also gives you an opportunity to be one with your car to understand whether or not you picked up some stone damage or whatever. And you do that, then you use your sponge. Let’s say that I did half the roof of the car. I rinse the entire car.

I don’t just rinse the roof, I don’t rinse the half of the roof. I rinse the entire car. Now I do the second half of the roof. I rinse the entire car again and I move down and I move down to the hood to half the hood and I rinse the entire car. You keep rinsing the entire car. Every time you wash something on a car, rinse the entire car.

Remember that this hand depend if you’re left or right-handed is the hand, is the magic hand. That’s the hand that’s gonna tell you what’s stuck to that paint service or where you’ve got some damage or where you have to be careful what’s needs some special attention. It’s a simple way to wash a car and [00:55:00] always top down.

And when you get to the belt line, that’s the beginning of the rocker panels. Yeah. You get to the BeltLine at that point, you change your water, you change your sponge, and you go to a new water, new sponge, and a little more car wash mixed in. It’s gotta be a just a tad stronger. What you’re really trying to get off that paint surface, and you gotta think about this for a moment, is not just road silt and bug proteins and acid rain deposits and all that.

The biggest culprit that kills paint surface on the car is the catalytic converter of the car in front of you. American cars are very interesting. They use sulfur based cats and the operating time. It takes for that cat to get up to full operating temperature is five zero minutes, 50 minutes. The average commute for most people is 30, so while you’re sitting behind [00:56:00] that suburban and you’re on the 4 0 5 or wherever you are, whatever highway you’re on and you’re trying to get to work, that catalytic converter in that suburban is spinning hydrochloric acid at a pH of about two.

All over your car. Nice. You’ve gotta get that stuff off of there because when it dries, it’s not active anymore. The moment that it, it that, it gets moist again. The moment you get some due, the moment it, it, it obtains any form of moisture, it becomes an active acid again. So washing your car is probably the single, the most important thing you can do.

And believe it or not, it’s the place where most cars get damaged by their owners because they don’t know how to wash a car. So I’m hearing you’re not a fan of car washes. Well, I got in a lot of trouble. I got in a lot of trouble. I’ve been interviewed a lot talking about different magazines. I’ve been on air with different radio shows.

I got asked that question, Chuck, what do you think of automated car washes? I said, well, there’s a lot of automated car [00:57:00] washes that use different kinds of soaps, different kinds of cleaners. One that really, that really stands out in my mind is the carwash that doesn’t use any soap. It’s 100% environmentally correct.

And of course the announcer went, wow, that’s great, Chuck. Tell us all about it. I said, well, what happens is, is that it takes all the dirt from the car in front of you with the 10 cars in front of you. It runs it through a filtration process and it takes out the dirt in certain micron size, and then air blasts it with water at your car to clean your car.

So literally what they’re doing is they’re sand blasting your car, and this guy was on air and he said, no shit. I said, yeah, I’m telling you that’s what they do. And automated car washes, there’s ones with brushes, there’s touchless, there’s all of this. You’ll find that, that a lot of people stop going to an automated carwash when they realize that it didn’t do a good job.

That’s very true. The ones that really do clean the car are using different kinds of [00:58:00] detergents that will strip the wax right off of a car. Now let’s talk about the offense that a lot of guys and gals make in home when they wash their car. They go and they grab that stuff on the kitchen sink. The one safe for ducks.

One safe for ducks. The blue. The blue stuff. Yeah, the blue stuff. There’s, what is it? There’s joy. There’s gone Pul Gone Ajax. Yeah. All that stuff. Right? It’s interesting about Zal wax. Zal Wax is made from fats and oils. Carava is a low density lipoprotein. It is a fat, it is a solid fat, but it’s a fat coconut oil, banana oil, orange oil.

Any of these oils, they’re, these are fats and oils. Yep. Now that’s stuff that’s sitting on your sink. What is it designed to remove from your dishes? Grease and fat. Fat fats and oil. So wait a minute. If I take this stuff out to my car, if I’ve just spent all that money on and I wax the car, And I wanna wash it, and I [00:59:00] go grab that Dawn.

Yeah. I’m not gonna hurt any ducks. I’m gonna grab the dawn and I’m gonna go out there and I’m gonna put that dawn on my car and I’m gonna wash it, and then I’m gonna call Ziel and say, I got a problem. It doesn’t beat up anymore. You know what our people have trained, been trained to do. What did you wash your car with?

First question. Out of our customer service. What did you wash your car with? Wow. That is the first question you asked me. I had a problem as well. And you’re like, what did you wash your car with? I’m like, uh, yeah. I mean, it’s very interesting. People sort of get disassociated with what the right thing to do is, and that’s, uh, I don’t know why that happens, but, you know, maybe it’s just that they’re expecting miracles, uh, to happen all at one time.

Very quickly. First of all, the W in wax means work. Ok. I like that. That’s what that, that’s what that w means. Okay. You’ve gotta be ready to go and work on your car. Yeah. We have customers, many, many [01:00:00] customers that will call up and place an order on a Monday, and they want us to get the product to them before the weekend, because they’re gonna go spend time commuting with their car.

They’re gonna go into their garage, put on some music, they’re gonna break open a bottle of Pinot Noir. They’re gonna work on their car for four hours. They’re gonna be with their automobile. It’s not a problem loving your car. We’ve got this stigma that somehow socially has been pushed around. Gee, uh uh.

How do you like your car? Yeah, I like this car. Do you love your car? Well, I don’t know. People are nervous about saying, I love that car. You know, I ab absolutely love it. I’ve got a car that I love. I’ve got a a 19 9500 SL panoramic. It’s got a glass roof. I bought it off of a, a friend of mine who bought the car brand new and his wife didn’t want it.

And, uh, the car sat in his garage for shit almost 10 years. And I said, I’ll take it. We’ve slowly but surely had to replace a whole lot of goodies on this [01:01:00] car. But I love that car and that car loves me. I know it. And, and cars have personalities. Mm-hmm. And some of them have quirks, some of them. Hell, I’ve got a 1984 Mercedes-Benz one 90 E 2.3 16.

Right. Oh, nice. My wife can’t start, that car won’t start for her. I walk out there, I talk to her, I rub her fender, I sit down. I tell her how beautiful she is and how I’ve missed her all this while the fuel pump is priming. But yeah, go ahead and, yeah. And I turn the key and I can hear the cold start valve clicking away and I turned the key in.

There you go. Going back to what we talked about washing the car, it’s the simplest and the most important protection you can give your car is to wash it correctly. The next thing is, is cleaning the paint. People tend to put all kinds of things on their cars, waxes. They never clean the paint. They never get the paint ready for wax.

You know, like when we brought out cleaner wax, there were a lot of people that said, you guys are out your mind. [01:02:00] You’re making make a wax that has no petrochemicals. That doesn’t have any petrol solvents at all. No. We are gonna make a cleaner wax that’s water-based and, oh, you can’t make a water-based, what are you outta your mind?

Oh, we’re not out of our mind. We can make a water-based cleaner wax. In fact, we’ve just recently reformulated our cleaner wax to add s i o two to it. S i O two is one of those magic, it’s not a word, it’s a, it’s a, a, a naming convention for a product, which is actually fused silica. And the fused silica has been ground to nano-sized.

Well, I will say this, I’m gonna get a lot of people that are gonna react to this. All of those so-called ceramic coatings for cars are bs. They’re not real, they’re just not real product, and they’re claiming to have SIO two in the product. And that what’s, that’s what makes them ceramic. SIO two is a polishing agent.

There’s no way to make it stick to a car. You couldn’t make ceramics stick to a car. [01:03:00] Have you’ve ever been to a ceramic studio and you’ve seen when they’ve taken ceramic and they then put it into a, you know, a 9,000 degree kiln. There’s no way to do that with a paint surface. There’s no chemicals you can make that will make SIO two stick to a paint surface.

What you can do is you can take 60,000 or 300000 cent a stoke silicone, which by the way is a hydraulic fluid for, uh, silicone hydraulic fluid, and you can take that and put it on a paint surface and give a detailer. A high speed wool padd buffer and have them burnish that stuff into your paint surface.

Not cool because at that point that silicone heats up enough, it causes that silicone to permeate your clear coat and you can end up with little cloudy sort of marks that you think are water spots that you never get out. Cuz now it’s silicone sitting in between your clear coat and your color coat.

There are a lot of people that swear up and down by these ceramic coatings. [01:04:00] We’ve never produced a ceramic coating. We won’t produce a ceramic coating because they’re just not real. What we have done though, is we now have SIO two and HD cleanse. Fabulous polishing agent, and by the way, the particles are nanos and it does an incredible job.

It’s scary when you think about what companies do to create product. We call it ssdc. Same shit, different container, ssdc. There’s a tremendous number of companies out there that are doing that. They haven’t changed the formulary of their products since the sixties. Back when cars were getting waxed, cars were painted.

They didn’t have enamel paints, cars back the thirties and forties and in the fifties. They used lacquer paints and they painted the cars with 26, 30, 35, 40 mils of paint. So what people would do is that they would get some kerosene in a rag and you’d wipe the car down with kerosene. In a rag. It would take off a little bit of the paint.

The car would look great for about three or four [01:05:00] days. Then it would look like hella elegant. One of the first guys that came out with a commercial wax was Ben Hirsch and Ben Hirsch started this little company up in Illinois called Turtle Wax. We were good friends with the people at Turtle Wax. We know them.

At one point, turtle Wax was a distributor for our products. They would distribute our products to the stores like AutoZone and Pep Boys and all those guys. We didn’t have any way of distributing those because we didn’t have an E D I computer system. Didn’t have salespeople. There was a whole foreign market to us.

They’re probably one of the sharpest companies around. They don’t subscribe to ssdc, but there’s a whole lot of ’em out there that do. We’ve for years, Have tried to get people to understand when they’re working on their cars. There’s no magic. It’s good product, safe product, product that’s safe for you and your kids to use.

We’ve never had anyone call us up and say, geez, you know, I think the smell of your product or your fumes have made me sick, or any of that kind of stuff. We’ve never had any of that, [01:06:00] but primarily, uh, what we love to do is build product, build great products. That’s what we like to do, and hear from customers that they love us and that’s what else could we hope for.

Right. That’s awesome. One of the things you had said to me was, so when you’re done waxing your car, can you see the wax? That’s actually a really important and yet loaded statement. I know the answer, but I’m wondering if our listeners do. No, we’ve done a lot of events. We’ve gotten up and I’ve gotten up and I’ve shown people what carava bricks look like.

Try to tell people that you can’t buy a product that says it’s 100% carava. Cause you wouldn’t be able to do anything with it except maybe use it as a weapon. I mean, I. It’s a brick. A hundred percent carava as sod as as a rock. I had a question come up and I remember this question. It was at a Miata Club event, and the people that belong to the Miata Club really loved their cars.

Uh, you talk about naming their cars. It, it’s, it’s incredible. I had this one customer say to me, how do I know when I’m supposed to wax my car? I said, well, let’s talk [01:07:00] about this for a moment. When you’re done waxing your car, can you see the wax on the car? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Really? You can see the wax? No.

No. I, I guess I could see the shine. Okay, so you can see the results of you waxing the car. Yeah. How do you know when to waxing the, well, the car looks like it needs to be waxed. He says, you need to realize something. When a car looks like it’s begging to be waxed, you’re not seeing the loss of car wax.

You’re seeing new paint damage. You need to keep that in mind. When your car is begging to be waxed, it’s doing it for a reason. It’s because the paint is being damaged. I have to tell you, the crowd went silent when I said that. It was like all the lights lit and they all understood what we’re talking about.

It goes back to that magic hand you were talking about. We like very much to have people contact us and say, what’s the proper methodology? What’s the proper products I should use? Which products should I use in a row? We try to help people understand that and we get a lot of phone calls from customers that say, geez, you know, I bought.

X, Y, Z product and I [01:08:00] put that on the car and then I put your product over it and it doesn’t seem to work. Yeah, I would think that would happen. That’s like running into your kitchen, making up pancake batter and putting Turkey gravy in the pan and trying to make pancakes on top of Turkey gravy. It’s not gonna happen.

We try and tell people that, you know, the Xol products really are engineered to work with each other. There’s a system there and if you follow the directions and that’s something that I wanna circle back and talk to you about. You mentioned about directions, Tanya, it is your chance to chime in. Tell ’em real men don’t need directions.

You know, it’s like, you know why I, why Ikea? Doesn’t have written directions and they’ve got pictures on all their stuff because it saves them a lot of time in cost in those manuals and that, and it doesn’t give ’em any phone calls. What do you mean? Well, as an example, on the back of our [01:09:00] waxes, it says, please refrigerate after opening.

Yep. We’ve had customers and we at least one or two a week will call up and say, back of my container, says the refrigerate after open. Does that mean I should stick it in the refrigerator?

Well, yeah. That’s an indication that we want you to put it into your refrigerator. We’ve had customers do some of the darnest things. We had a guy wax the seats of his white seats of his Cadillac convertible with our xmal carbon. We figured that if it works on the paint, it’s gotta work on my seats. We try to give people directions that are fairly simple.

A lot of people still don’t follow the directions. We’ve had people make xmal tests on YouTube and not follow the directions. So that’s a really important point that you bring up because I have baked off Xmal products with friends of mines that do detailing. It’s like you said, you know, bust out the beer or the Pinot Noir and a whole day affair, and they’re [01:10:00] sitting there like, look how cool I am.

I can do this. I got my buffer and I’m done in 20 minutes and I’m sitting there and I’m putting things on and waiting things for dry guys. I’m gonna go get a sandwich. I’ll be back there. Like, what are you doing? And then when it comes down to it, we actually get back to what we were talking about before, which is the feel.

Finish, you can’t see. Yeah, their car, their car looks shiny, so does mine. But you rub your hand across it and the xmal feels like butter and their stuff just kind of feels like whatever. But I follow the directions. I’ve been using this stuff for a long time. You have to put the time and effort and to your point, love into the process to get out of it what you, what you want.

But please continue that. That’s right. And zy products, by the way, are designed to be used by hand. Correct. Okay. People call up and say, geez, you know, the Christmas or my birthday or whatever, and I got a new buffer. Can I use Zy with a buffer? Our customer service people ask the magic question, are you a technician that does this for a living?

When the answer is no, then we tell them, well keep all the packaging. [01:11:00] Take that wonderful gift back to the store that they bought it from and pick out something else. I will not stand behind anybody using a buffer unless they do it for a living, and by the way, you can show me where you’ve got some great restoration results.

You’ve done some great things using that buffer. I’m interested. I was at a place one time where a guy came up to me and said, well, what do you think of my car? Just out a detail. He was proud. It was all scalloped. I didn’t know what to tell the man. Get your eyes checked lately. I mean, I, I will say this, I have used a buffer with xmo once, and I have regretted it.

I know better, but I was really struggling with this one car in particular and this hood, and I’m like, it didn’t matter what kind of elbow grease I put into it, I didn’t seem to have just enough oomph. I don’t know what it was. I used the buffer and I realized as I was doing it, at which point it was the point of no return.

I was like, I’m heating this up too much. And it’s reacting to me doing this right. [01:12:00] And I had to start all over again. And I was like, now I’ve done this three times and I’m aggravated, you know? And I’m, I don’t know. It, it, again, it’s one of those things, you know, RT fm, as we say in my world, read the freaking manual.

So it’s super important to follow those directions. But rtfm, I gotta use that. I gotta, that is great. Read the freaking manual. Oh my God. But, but yeah, so granted it takes me six times longer than anybody else to get the job done, but, At the end of the day, when you compare car for car, for car, even similar cars, you know, coming from the same factory, it’s like, man, that xmal feels really, really different.

And it’s very buttery. It’s very smooth. The scent is addicting like we’ve been talking about. You have to put in the time and the effort to get out the results that you really want. There is no quick solution when it comes to detailing these cars at a high level. No, there isn’t a quick solution. The difference between going to a five star restaurant or going to McDonald’s, absolutely you can get it done, Griffin, McDonald’s, but it’s [01:13:00] not gonna be the same.

I wanna touch on something before we kind of wrap up this entire thought. You had some special techniques for detailing your car that I thought were kind of interesting and I, I’m just gonna lob this one up for you. Let’s start with black textured trim. What’s your hot take on dealing with things like that?

One of the problems that happens with black textured trim, if you use the product that contains any kind of polishing agent, Even if you use a product like our cleaner wax that has a polishing agent, the s i o two, the s io two will stick to black trim. People say to us, how do I get that black again? How do I make that that look good?

Again, there’s lots of ways to do it. One way to do it, which I don’t recommend, is to use break fluid on that black trim, which I know a lot of people have done, and the moment you get break food on a paint surface, it dissolves it. You don’t wanna do that. My favorite is either Jif or Skippy Crunch peanut butter.

You need to go buy a medium toothbrush and [01:14:00] take a little bit of that peanut butter and put it in a. Like a a, a ramer can they call them. And you warm it up in your microwave oven a little bit and you go out there and you spread the peanut butter over the trim and you rub it with that toothbrush. What that peanut butter does, the peanut oil gets underneath whatever is sitting on that black trim’s not supposed to be there and starts to lift it.

And the crunchy peanuts themselves act as the abrasive and they break down before the plastic does, and you just wash it off and it does a wonderful job at cleaning up the black trim peanut butter. That’s awesome. Now listen, we’ve, one of the other secrets to imal is you can ice the surface. Let’s say that you have a car that you really want to get an extremely deep finish on.

We did this with a Ferrari dino, and it was in yellow Ferrari, Dino out in California. It was Bill Weiner’s car. He was showing it a pebble, and his guys did a pretty decent job of preparing the paint. They didn’t have it to my satisfaction. So what we used [01:15:00] was Xmal, Concor wax, put it on with your bare hands, spread it out.

And before we buffed it, we took bags of ice that were rolled in towels. We placed them on the surface of the car, let it sit there for about 10 minutes, pulled ’em off, took some more Concorde, rubbed it on the current concor that was there, and then we iced it again. And then we went ahead and applied one more coat.

Of Concord let us sit. Took our micro wipes and very slowly worked the wax into the surface. We stretched out car on the surface. When the car got cold and started to warm up again, it absorbed the moisture from the towel. When we got done with the car, it looked like someone had shot the car with about 20 coats of clear, great surface, great finish.

And that’s actually one of the questions I get a lot when you know, showing off Zemo products is, well, how do you know when it’s ready? And I say all the time, if you can run your finger across the wax as it’s curing and it doesn’t leave a streak, then it’s ready. And at that [01:16:00] point it comes off as a powder.

It’s actually super easy to remove because it’s fully bonded at that point. And you could just wipe it down almost like you were just, you know, kind of just wiping the car off like you were dusting. Exactly. It’s super easy, but if you have to work or put it in a ton of elbow into that xmal, you haven’t waited long enough.

People use too much of it. That’s the other thing. Yes. If, if I had investors in my business, I would not make them very happy. Cause an eight container. Of our wax will last A motorsport enthusiast like five years, you’re gonna get at least 20, maybe even 24 full waxings out of that eight ounce container.

A little bit goes a long way with Simon. That was the Brill cream model too, right? Yeah, a little goes a long little dabble. Do you Little dle. Do you? Little do, yeah. Interesting. Yeah, that is, that’s very interesting. Wow. So let’s just quickly talk about some new products. That are coming out or have just come out on the market.

I know you clued me in cuz we were talking about [01:17:00] ceramics and SIO too. But there’s actually something cutting edge that xmo is putting out there. So do you wanna expand on the graphene wax? Yeah. Yeah. We’ve got a couple of different products that we’ve played with. We’ve been looking at the kinds of material that would provide someone who loves their car, a finish on their car.

That was almost permanent. We the first company to come out with a graphene based product. We didn’t invent graphene. Graphene was found by a couple of engineers back around 19, I think it was 1991 and at Manchester University in England. They were actually, uh, uh, able to separate graphene from graphene oxide, which is what’s in a pencil.

Graphene is a two dimensional material. It’s missing its third and fourth atom. The military has been looking and working with graphene. They have made some new tiles for spaceship reentry. They’ve actually made a t-shirt that’s bulletproof. It’s uh, a hundred times [01:18:00] stronger than carbon steel and it’s as flexible as water.

And this is what makes graphene so really interesting. We contacted a couple of different companies that have got real graphene. We did some testing. We bought the equipment. We bought a shearing homogenate, we ordered the graphene, and the graphene had to come in in glass containers. You can’t come in packed on anything else except glass, otherwise it’ll permeate the material you were sitting on.

We decided to look at producing what’s known as a graphene colloid. Colloids are one step beyond an emulsion. We produce these graphene colloids and we then took oils. In particular, we took lotus leaf extract oil, and we took caral resin, which is from our, our liquid car, and we homogenize those together with graphene.

There’s some interesting things when you put it on a car and we, we’ve had lots of problems trying to convey what our graphene product does to a customer, because it’s hard for [01:19:00] them to understand when you put it on the paint surface of a car. It finds its third and fourth atom. If you clean the car surface and there’s no wax on it, it will find its third and fourth atom, and at that point it becomes part of your car.

It’s no longer a coating. It’s no longer a wax. It’s not a sealant that we’ve put on the car. It now becomes part of your paint. It becomes part of the metal on your car. It becomes part of the metalize plastic on your car. The questions we’ve been asked about our graphene product is how long does it last?

It lasts as long as the paint does on your car. If you wanted to shine the car up even more a little bit, you could use our spray detailer over it. But if you wanna take your paint and you wanna take all the surfaces of your car and you wanna harden those surfaces, graphene is the way to do it. Now, we brought our product out immediately.

Three or four companies popped up and said, well, we’ve got graphene. We’ve got graphene, we’ve got graphene oxide. They’re using number two, pencil. Led in their product and they’re calling it graphene. We’ve done some [01:20:00] interesting cars. We’ve got a, a blue 3 56 that we use the graphene product on that is staggering, absolutely staggering.

The same owner has a, uh, anthracite nine 11 Targa that we used it on. We’ve used the graphene product on our Ford F three 50, super Duty 99 dually that we use to haul around our horse trailer. The truck looks brand new, literally looks brand new. We’ve got a bunch of people across the country that have used our graphene product.

There’s a fellow that runs a magazine called Garage Style Magazine. Have you ever seen it? Donna out there runs it. Donna’s moved from California to Texas now and he’s got an old Mustang that he decided to clean up real well and try our graphene product on, and he’s still talking to himself. I understand how this stuff works.

The finish you get. On the graphene is pretty scary. Look, that happens to the surface, especially if you’ve done the right paint prep. You’ve really cleaned up the paint. And by the way, we, we’ve got an odd name for the graphene product. It’s our Atomic Graphene [01:21:00] Shield. Okay. It sounds futuristic. Well, it’s not so much futur.

We, we have gotten some complaints about the name. Some people have said Atomic Graphene Shield. I mean, did you guys watch Back to the Future a few times? No, it’s, it’s very, try to name it, it’s very German if you think about it. It describes what it does. I mean, that’s how like a lot of German vocabulary is, right?

It’s just description, atomic, atomic Graphene Chew. It is, it is an atomic product. It’s graphene. And it does shield the car. There you go. Um, so that’s a product that’s new. We’ve got two new products that we’re working on with Martin Guitar and we have one more product in our factory. We’ve got a bunch of panels from this company that’s in Santa Clara, California that builds EVs.

We’re gonna be letting this product out on Amazon on an exclusive basis. We’ve got a product that is for electric vehicles. It’s a positive ion product. The mix is positive ion. And the reason why [01:22:00] we chose to go positive ion is because the bodies of true electric cars, not so much hybrids, but true EVs.

Are forced negative charge. They have a negative charge on the body of the car. That is a forced negative charge. It’s not just grounding, it’s a forced negative charge. That’s an old British car and it’s, it’s as an example, that’s a Lucas car. That’s a story for another day. That’s a story of another day.

Lucas Lucas light switch on often flicker. The interesting thing about our product for electric cars, if you were to take a look at any of the electric cars, whether it’s a new, the new Audis Mercedes No, the, the Teslas, the batteries that run the motors are not the same batteries that run the rest of the car.

They don’t use those batteries to run the rest of the car. The voltage is too high, the amperage is too high. If you were to, uh, able to actually touch the connectors on the battery that runs that car, You’re gonna die. No question about it. That’s serious [01:23:00] stuff. There’s another separate battery in there that’s designed to negatively charge the body that, so in case there’s any leak of any current from any of the batteries that run the car, it’s gonna ground out.

We noticed that our standard waxes didn’t do very well on EVs, so we decided to come up with a new product. I think it’s on our website now. Product is called Ion. It comes with a container that has a bag in it and the product is sitting in the bag in the container and you pump the container up, which pressurizes the outside of the bag, which lets you spray it, and it’s a metered spray and it comes out in a mist.

And there’s some videos on YouTube of our product ion that you should be able to find interesting. So in January, we’re gonna let that product go to Amazon and let Amazon sell it exclusively. So Chuck, looking back over the incredible history of Imel 40 plus years now, and the love and passion that you’ve put into developing these products to take care of cars for all sorts of.[01:24:00]

Applications, but also for airplanes, boats, horses, musical instruments and such. Down the line. I mean, it’s absolutely fascinating. And for the folks out there that are maybe still non-believers, it’s time to give Xmal a try. Put it up against the products that you have and remember to read the directions first, but, and and, and see how it stacks up and see how you like it.

Keep up with the developments that they’ve got going on. These new products are fascinating. I mean, they’re at the front end of some really, really cool things. So if you wanna learn more about Xmal, be sure to check out www.xmal.com for more information or follow them on Instagram and Facebook at xmal underscore official.

So, Chuck, I can’t thank you enough for coming on Break Fix, sharing these stories, telling us about the history of Xmal and you know, sharing your passion with all of our listeners. This has been absolutely fantastic. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was, it’s lots of fun and I’m happy to talk to anyone who contacts the company and says, Hey.

[01:25:00] I’m gonna talk to that Bennett character cuz I’ve got a problem with my car. And, uh, we wanna hear about the problems. We wanna, we wanna solve problems. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what the company was built on, was built on solving what kind of problems people had with their, with their finishes on their cars.

Your passion and authenticity has been refreshing to see, so it’s been a delight listening to all your stories. Thank you, Chuck. Thank you.

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