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!

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] BreakFix podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from all over the autosphere, from wrench turners and racers to artists, authors, designers, and everything in between. Our goal is to inspire a new generation of petrolheads that wonder How did they get that job or become that person?

The road to success is paved by all of us because everyone has a story.

Crew Chief Eric: 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, Zymol products enhance any finish without harsh chemicals or abrasives.

And with us tonight to tell the Zymol story, educate us on proper car care, and recount some great stories [00:01:00] is the founder and CEO of Zymol. Chuck Bennett and co hosting with me tonight from the drive through is Tanya. So I want to welcome both Tanya and Chuck to the show and let’s get into it.

Executive Producer Tania: Great.

Crew Chief Eric: So I got to say, I have been preaching about Zymol 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 Zymol 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?

Chuck Bennett: It’s interesting how I got started and how the company started back in the late 70s. I had gone to Germany. And the idea was, I had seen [00:02:00] a movie that was on television, like a miniseries 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 married a Dane. And her actual name was, Her last name was Rothschild. She was one of the Rothschild babies.

Where she grew up was a place called Bischofsheim, Germany. So I decided to go to Bischofsheim 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 Bishop time, it’s, it’s on the Tal 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 Landau kind of carriage in Germany at that time, they kept up the approach and the technique of restoring a [00:03:00] 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 black carriages looked like light came in near it and bent around corners. To get into the carriage like they were metal.

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 on 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 odor.

The odor was just the worst you possibly could imagine. Well, what it was was animal fats that had become rancid. There was lards, there was suet. It was the worst thing you [00:04:00] 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 product and I put it in the container. It reminded me a lot of that Lederkrantz cheese. Okay, mixed up with that fish that that goes bad in Norway that they want to put, uh, they have a plan to camp that fish fish.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. Yeah.

Chuck Bennett: 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 whiff of this container because stuff was coming through the container and I’ve got to 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. So I was lucky. I went through customs. It was no problem. I got back here to the States and being a [00:05:00] 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 can’t make a product for myself that contains these animal fats. I decided to look at different kinds of plant 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 LDL count, which is one of the highest that I’ve ever seen, which is carnauba.

Carnauba is a super LDL. Low density lipoprotein in its natural form, carnauba wax is harder than a concrete block. Wow. And we can get into that later on, we can explain all that stuff. 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 [00:06:00] said, okay, let’s see what kind of oils and plant fats can combine and maybe we can break down this car now, Bob.

And he decided that the best thing he could break the car now but down with was citric terpene. Tanya, you’re familiar with terpenes?

Executive Producer Tania: Uh, it’s been a while.

Chuck Bennett: It’s 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, which will help you dissolve, which will help you create an emulsion using the carnauba and your plant oils in 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 going to do? I went back to Mr. [00:07:00] Patel and I said, we’re going to do, we have a problem. He said, 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. We need some bioactivity in there.

He said, do you know, there is an animal. That converts plant oils to a wax, and really what he meant was an insect. What we were able to find was the reagent through a company in Chicago called Signal, even though it was, it was synthetic because 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. 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 530i in Topaz, gorgeous color. And I was using the commoditable [00:08:00] products that are on the market. When I waxed that car and I looked at my applicator cloth and I said, 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 it’s simple. It’s because the kinds of braces and the kinds of solvents that were being used, we’re doing a very nice job and dissolving my paint surface. So I said, okay, I’ve got to make myself something that’s not going to do that.

So I made the product in my kitchen. Oh. The interesting part of this is, is that I belong to the 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 [00:09:00] 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.

I just want you to know that last month you gave close to 1, 500 of our money away making these products. I said, how is that possible? You bought these raw materials. You bought two 50 cup coffee urns as you’re 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, there was a wonderful restaurant called the, uh, Silver Inn. And it was located in Wallingford, Connecticut. That’s where we had BMW Car Club meeting. And I had talked to Mark Luckman. At that point, he was the director of the BMW Car Club. He was coming in to say hello. He granted me 15 minutes up in front of everybody.

I got up and said, everyone, you know who I am? And [00:10:00] applause. Yes, yes, yes. You know who you are? You got this great stuff. And I said, well, I can’t give it away anymore. Cause it was like somebody who had gone out and keyed every one of their BMWs got to see their faces. So I said, uh, well, I don’t know what to do.

I just can’t give you these products anymore. And somebody in the back, in fact, I remember his name, Rick Oviatt raises his hand and he says, uh, why don’t you sell us the product? And I’m thinking about

Executive Producer Tania: money,

Chuck Bennett: sending the products. Okay. Well, I could do that, but I have to figure out what it’s going to cost.

So I go back and I’m trying to figure out what it’s going to cost me to sell this product. The scary part, the scary part was that it was probably going to cost me per container around 12 to 13 to make up a container of that product. And this is a

Crew Chief Eric: 1980s dollars, right? So this is

Chuck Bennett: 1980s dollars. Yeah. And I said, okay, I could sell it, but I need to make a profit because I’m going to take some of that money and [00:11:00] plug that back into the business so I can buy more materials.

What am I going to do to figure out what I should write says that. And at that point I had talked to my brother and my brother says, look, he said, it’s costing a 12 to 13 bucks to make it. Are you including your labor in there? He said, no, what labor? He’s well, somebody has got to be making it. I said, yeah.

He says, Look, why don’t you price it at 19? Okay. He says, Yeah. He says to me, he says, everybody’s got a 20 bill in their wallet, especially car guys. They’re going to want to 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, they said, okay, so I came up with an ad and the ad was the container of our products and the title of the ad was, this is the first car wax and you should not gloss over.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s good. I like that.

Chuck Bennett: I have to tell you, I had a friend of mine [00:12:00] helped me create the ad. When I talked to the people at the BMW car club. The money they wanted for me to do an ad in there was like insanity. I said, Oh Jesus, what am I going to do? So my brother said, why don’t you contact the Mercedes Benz club and see what they charge for advertising in the star magazine?

I said, okay. So I contacted the star magazine and they said, yeah, well, let’s place. The ad is going to be 800. If we 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 that had a little coupon thing at the bottom where someone could cut that out and do a coupon and add an address.

I had to get a post office box. So I went down to Brantford, Connecticut and got post office box, seven 20 little post office box. So the ad ran, nothing. I don’t hear anything. I’m not getting any letters coming in, nothing. I go to the post [00:13:00] office box, like every other day, I hear crickets and there’s moths that have come flying out of it.

I said, okay, this was one of those ventures on my part that I’m going to 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 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. I don’t know if anybody knows who Wang labs was up in low mass.

Crew Chief Eric: I worked for a derivative of Wang. So I I’m with you. In

Chuck Bennett: fact, my office was down the hall.

From Fred Wang, who is Dr. Wang’s son, right? I get a phone call. The phone call is from the postmaster in Brantford. And he says to me, I’m going to try and do the voice. He [00:14:00] says, Mr. Bennett. I says, yeah? He says, I need to see you in my office tomorrow. Jesus. Yes, sir. Can you tell me what’s wrong? He says, no, I’ll talk to you when you get here.

I called the wife and I said, listen, I don’t know what I, you know, maybe there’s some, some laws that I’ve broken by advertising products in a magazine, or maybe we need to have a federal license to do this stuff. Or maybe the federal trade commission doesn’t like the fact that everybody else is wax on the market.

It’s like 2 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 and walk in, there’s like a window, right, knock 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, [00:15:00] mailbags 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 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. I said, you need to come home. We got a situation. It’s 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, [00:16:00] here’s a 20 bill.

Keep the dollar for the future. Thank you. And this is crazy. Our first ad netted about 40, 000 in sales. So I sat back at that point and I said, wow, let me see computers that make me crazy, 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 design all wax container. That’s patented. By the way, it’s a patented container. Oh, and there’s there’s all [00:17:00] kinds of things. Strange things about that container. We’ll tell you about it as well. The company has grown from this I’m working in my kitchen to a worldwide company.

I mean, if we sell in just about every single country on the planet, except for ones we can’t sell to, I wish I could like Cuba, there’s a few Asian countries I’d like to sell to. One of which is a got this little guy who’s got a funny haircut. It’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 1970s, you know, seventies Pintos in the garage that they’re massaging, that they love.

Why would anybody own? Why? Because they love the car. There’s all kinds of. Wonderful automobiles in the hands of wonderful [00:18:00] 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 bleach g cleanse. I, I

Crew Chief Eric: ha I own it. I, I have an assortment of zy products. Yeah. And HD cleanse.

Chuck Bennett: HD cleanse is like an exfoliate for paint. And the interesting thing about HD cleanses, 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 abrading 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 got to be very careful what you use on, on a car today. The older cars have got 20, 30 mils paint. You can scrub like crazy with those cars. But you still have to [00:19:00] be gentle with paint. 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 got to be gentle. You’ve got to have a little finesse. You’ve got to work, you’ve got to be mentally in tune with the automobile and you’ve got to care about it because 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 a wax to it.

Because for years, people had believed that all they had to do was wash the car. And wax it. That doesn’t work.

Crew Chief Eric: I will get into that in a little bit, but Chuck, I got to pause you here because wow, I think this is the most epic origin story we’ve ever had on break fix. 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 Zymol has been the number one recommended wax for BMW and the BMW [00:20:00] club. I never realized that until now, but also I think a question falls out of this. Where did the name come from?

Chuck Bennett: Oh, well, I was sitting there and trying to come up with a name.

You know, there’s all kinds of things that were in my head, regal wax, and just stupid, stupid things. I like names that sort of name what the product is to sort of tell you what it does. Now, the waxes we make are enzymatic emollients. They’re zymes. 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 emollients. So I’m looking at this word, two words, actually. I said enzymatic emollient.

There’s a sign there and it’s oil. We’ve got plant oils. What’s the German word for oil? O with an umlau, L. O E L is a German word for oil. [00:21:00] Seim, oil. Put the two of them together. Seimel. That created Seimel. And I’ve got the original press type lettering. You know what press type lettering was? Back in the 70s and in the 80s there were these letters you could buy sheets and you’d put the sheet down on a piece of paper and you’d rub it and it would transfer the letter onto the sheet you’re working with.

I have the original press type lettering of the logo, Zymol. 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 Zymol logo. That’s where the name came from. It is an explanation of what the product is, an enzymatic emollient.

Crew Chief Eric: 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?

Chuck Bennett: A frustrated entrepreneurial scientist who has absolutely made every possible mistake Right. All I can tell you is, [00:22:00] is that if my mistakes were cow manure, you’d have no place to walk 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 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, Carnauba 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. Carnauba as an example. Carnival comes from a palm tree called the Copernicus Seraphira.

That palm tree grows in three places in the world, actually four now. It grows [00:23:00] in Brazil. Brazilians are well known for their carnival. It grows in Egypt. It grows in Africa, but it grows in South Africa. And it grows in Brooksville, Florida.

Crew Chief Eric: You were equatorial until that point.

Chuck Bennett: Yeah. We have our own Carnauba orchard.

Is that

Crew Chief Eric: specifically for Xymo? You have your own?

Chuck Bennett: We have our own Carnauba plants. We treat them differently than everybody else. Let’s go back to Carnauba from the world. Brazilian Carnauba is used in almost everything. It’s used in candies, cosmetics. It’s used everywhere. If you’re, have you ever eaten an M& M?

If you’ve eaten a Tic Tac? They contain car now. You get back, you can look at the package and it says it right up. That’s what gives it

Crew Chief Eric: the glossy quote unquote candy coating, right? Well, it’s,

Chuck Bennett: 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 get some monstrous triglycerides.

Executive Producer Tania: You’ve got too much in your body. It’s a bad thing.

Chuck Bennett: If you’ve [00:24:00] got too much, if you’re trying, if your triglyceride level is too high. There’s a good chance your cholesterol level is going to be totally out of whack. They use that. In Egypt, they use the carnauba there to wax thread. Okay. They wax thread in Egypt because when they’re making wonderful cotton 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 car now in South Africa, they use the car now, but for jewelry molds, it melts in about 180 degrees and it’s very solid. Once it becomes because it gets back down to to ambient room temperature. And in our car now, but here in Florida, we actually Treat the plants like maple trees and we sapped them.

We don’t just, they don’t take, we don’t take the car now, but from the fronds. Now the rest of the world takes the car now, but from the fronts, they send person up to the tree and they take the fronds off and they drop them down. [00:25:00] Somebody down below chops them all up. Puts them 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 shift them up.

There’s a few companies that you can get Carnauba from. The leading Carnauba purveyor in the United States is a company called Koster Kunin. And Koster Kunin is located in two different locations, uh, well three. There’s, they’ve got one in Holland. They’ve got one in St. Louis, New York, and they’ve got one in Connecticut.

They have the ability to process carnauba. And I’ve been in a plant where they process carnauba. They 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 rpm. In an explosion proof room. And what happens is it chops the carnauba up.

And the carnauba becomes a powder. And it floats inside the [00:26:00] 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 carnauba. There’s different types of carnauba. There’s brown carnauba, which is from the oldest of the fronds.

There’s yellow carnauba, and then there’s different grades of yellow carnauba, and there’s white carnauba. And white carnauba is most expensive because it comes from the upper fronds. Carnauba back in the 80s was going for around 15 a pound. Today it’s in the neighborhood of about 150 a pound. It’s pretty expensive material, and it’s very hard to get that, because if you’re getting Brazilian carnauba, 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. It’s one of the biggest challenges that my team has is getting raw materials. So we use Carnauba in almost everything we make. It is the wax of choice. And we’ve gone from using micro fine Carnauba [00:27:00] to today’s marketplace where we use nano fine.

Car, ba. And on top of that we use car, ba, sap, and car Ba. 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 used at the Aston Martin factory. 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 to the paint.

Also, our spray glaze is using liquid Carnauba. We’ve gone through different suppliers of Carnauba, 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.

Crew Chief Eric: So Chuck, you know, you alluded to a bunch of things as you were describing, you know, the origin of the company and talking about natural [00:28:00] 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 got to smell this, right?

Especially the cleaner wax. You smell that coconut, you smell the banana, the wheel wax has mints in it. Like it’s very prominent, the natural ingredients that are in Zymo. 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 Zymo offers products, not just for cars.

So do you want to elaborate on that and how you got into developing products for not just cars?

Chuck Bennett: First, let’s talk, we’ll go back and talk about the aromas. You know, we’ve gotten complaints about the aromas.

Crew Chief Eric: What?

Chuck Bennett: Yeah. One of the most pungent smells is banana tosafirols. They are very, very strong. We use the oil from something called a burrow banana.

Yeah. The burro banana is 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 [00:29:00] 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 when we were making products.

that contained banana oil. This stuff is just mind blowing how strong it is. But we’ve gotten actually complaints from people that said, I hate that smell. 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 spearmint 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 and says, dad, you’ve got to go on.

I think it was either the Gretsch or 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 basses, 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 [00:30:00] 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 out. He said, well, some of these are solid bodies. I said, well, the solid bodies. 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. I said, wow, you’re, you’re, you’re really, do you play? Yeah, I play, I play bass, all that stuff. And I said, well, why are you, why did you get on board?

What prompted you to get on board? I was very, very upfront. I said, because I want you to stop using my cleaner wax on your instruments. Boom, that tight. Why? I explained. And of course I got like Rick Troviat. Why don’t you sell us the product? I got one guy who sent me up, uh, sent a message to me that said, why don’t you create some products for musical [00:31:00] instruments?

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 you can test it on your collection? He says, not a problem. Dad is I’ve got some instruments here. I didn’t have a question. This big up at the time.

I said, we’ll test it out. 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’re able to create some very interesting products. We decided to do a show that’s called the NAMM show, N A M M. The NAMM show happens in Anaheim, California during January, and then in July it happens in Nashville.

The one in Nashville is called the Guitar Show. The one in Anaheim is the big major NAMM show and the NAMM stands for National Association of Music Merchants. It’s a misnomer because it’s international.

Crew Chief Eric: So sort of like SEMA for the car guys, right?

Chuck Bennett: Right. So I’m at the NAMM show and I’m displaying some of our products, talking to people about them.

We had a [00:32:00] booth, we had 50 inch screens. We did s going to do it. We’re gonn felt somebody tapping me I turn around and it was Martin guitar company. An he says, I just want to t 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 for musical instruments.

What I can tell you now is there isn’t a single guitar that leaves the Martin factory that doesn’t have Zymol all over it. Wow. They use our products on their fretboard. They use our products on their pickups. body of the guitar. Even some of our products are used to polish the finish on the guitar. I’ve got to tell you about the motorcycle world.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, right. Two wheeled friends. Yeah.

Chuck Bennett: Got two wheeled friends. Remember I mentioned Bob Sinclair? He

Crew Chief Eric: did. And actually I was going to lead into that because we got to talk about motorsport at some time.

Chuck Bennett: Okay. Bob Sinclair was the avid motorsport [00:33:00] king, if you will. He was a crazy, crazy guy. I’ve spent hours with Bob Sinclair and Mario Andretti and all these guys, all these race car drivers.

We’ve been out to Baja Cantina out in California, 2 a. m. in the morning, drinking Negro Modellas and getting totally toasted. Great, great times, right? After 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 CEO for Saab, Saab Cars. You know, mid November, Bob calls me up and he says, Bennett, we’re going to Milwaukee. I said, when do you want to 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 to fire hydrants out there.

I don’t want to go to Milwaukee. He said, we’re going to Milwaukee. I said, okay, I said, what are we going, what are we going to do in Milwaukee? He said, we’re going out to see a friend of mine, Willie G. Davis. He said, we’re going out to see Clyde Fessler. You’re going out to see the guys that [00:34:00] run Harley Davidson.

I said, okay, you still have that wax, he says to me, that rebels gasoline, right? I says, yeah, I gave you some, Bob. He says, yeah, I used it. It’s incredible. They were going out to show it to him. He said, make sure you bring some. I’ve already taken care of the flight. He says, you got to meet me, he says, at the Hartford airport.

Gonna meet you there, he says, at about nine o’clock in the morning. He called me at eight o’clock at night. Now I’ve got to go back down to the shop. I’ve got to 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 Clive Fessler.

The guy said, you’ve got to wax your refills gasoline, right? I said, yeah. He says, we’re going to 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 better do it quick. I said, there’s a temperature out here. He said, No, it’s, it’s, it’s okay.

He says, it’s okay. He said, Nick, it’s about 26 degrees. We’re good. The paint was fresh. I take the wax and I rubbed it in between my hands to [00:35:00] get the carnauba soft enough. And I rubbed this wax all over the tank. He says, what are you going to do now? I said, well, I’m going to wait a few minutes and I’m going to buff it.

Okay. 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 going to get it to test. So the guy comes out with a bucket of gasoline and a rag, rag in the bucket. Willie G takes the rag, drapes it over the tank. Gasoline’s like pouring out of this rag out of the ground, out of the floating duck.

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 going to leave this rag, soaked 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, William G. takes the rag off, it’s still damp, and the tank is cloudy.

He says, well, he says, that looks like a problem. I knew exactly what had happened. The carnauba in the wax is hygroscopic. It loves moisture. As the gasoline evaporated, the moisture in the air was getting to the carnauba. So I said, leave it [00:36:00] alone. What do you mean? Don’t touch it. So he stood there and watched it

Executive Producer Tania: and

Chuck Bennett: 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 90 days. So Bob and I get back on the airplane. I said, Bob, I haven’t got any way of making 10, 000. He says, that was what Willie G said. You 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 going to have to ship them anything. He says for a year, he says, don’t worry. So Harley Davidson with sold our Zymol talent 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 talent product. So it’s a wax that repels gas.

Crew Chief Eric: So this actually leads into another great story, but [00:37:00] I want to preface this with something really, really important. Oftentimes, as I try to instill in people, Hey, you should try out Xymo, 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 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 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 describe this and it’s all based upon the way you built it.

Yeah. 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 want to, do we want to talk about,

Chuck Bennett: we’re talking about fast.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s right.

Do you want to explain what fast means [00:38:00] first before people get like, what are we talking about?

Chuck Bennett: 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’s never

Crew Chief Eric: heard of him.

Chuck Bennett: I hadn’t heard of him. And he said, listen, he said, they really need something to help them go faster. I said, what are they driving? He said, you serious? I said, yeah, what are they driving? They drive Porsches. They drive Porsches. Okay. So he said, what can you do to reduce the coefficiency of drag on the cars?

Well, you know, we use different reagents. The reagent 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 up 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 [00:39:00] Friday. I said, no, what do we go? That’s not, no, nevermind, Bob. What time do I have to be at the airport tomorrow? He says, well, we’re going to head out to California tomorrow. He says, probably fly out somewhere 30, 10 o’clock.

So we fly out to California, go to the Del Mar race. And that’s where I meet Hans Stuck and Hurley Haywood. Two of my heroes. We go out there and Hans Stuck, you know, he’s, he’s like Lurch. Do you ever meet Hans Stuck? Not in person,

Executive Producer Tania: no.

Chuck Bennett: The guy’s like 6’10 He’s like, how he can fit into that portion was beyond me.

In fact, he’s had them modify the portion. 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 break?

He says, what’s that? Awesome. Nevermind Hans. I got, I got the picture. We took this product. Now we’re there. We had gotten some containers of CO2. [00:40:00] We put the wax on the cars and we shot the cars with CO2. We shot them 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 wanting to know what we were working on.

In fact, one of the officials came over and said, you know, what are you guys doing? Just preparing the surface for racing. As I told Hans, I said, Hans, we’ve waxed parts of the car that we should wax. And there are parts of the car that you need to have drag. You need some downforce in certain areas. We’ve got it nailed down.

I said, but be careful because the car is not going to 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. There’s about four laps and he comes back. He jumps out of the car.

God’s honest truth runs over to me, grabs me and picks me up like I’m a sack of potatoes. And he’s hugging me. [00:41:00] And he says, This is fabulous. He says, This is just fabulous. I said, Okay, Hans. I said, I guess you’ll like it. He says, Oh, he’s, I’m never going to just drive a car again without your product on the car.

So Bruno’s team used our product. Then at that point, Bob Snodgrass knew one of the people from the America’s cup. And we sent our guys to put fast America’s cup racer. We’ve got the pictures of it when it was at 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 have used it. Do you ever hear of Sutphin Marine? Sutphin Marine, they’re power boat racers. They don’t know if they still race at all, but they wouldn’t drop their boat in the water without Simon Fass being on the

Executive Producer Tania: boat.

Chuck Bennett: 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 [00:42:00] us that we had to remove it. So I built a wash and the wash contained more fast. Just watched it right. And added more fast to it. Now I get a call from BMW and they said, we need you to come to Rhode Island.

It was the petite Lamont. So we need to have you apply fast because he had heard about it to our cars. Me and a good friend of mine. Marty Sals, he’s 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 BMW, I need to talk to your drivers. I need to talk to them. And I finally got a chance to talk to them. 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 lowlife. Please don’t talk to me.

So I went ahead and I said, guys, these cars are not going to react the way [00:43:00] you have had them react before. The 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 going to be the same. It didn’t listen. They didn’t make it to the third turn.

Both of them went into the wall. We had other people try this technology.

Crew Chief Eric: Do you guys still make fast?

Chuck Bennett: 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 U S ski team 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 U S ski team decided to wax one ski with our fast technology product. That sounds like a terrible idea. Went down a Hill and immediately corkscrew it 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 [00:44:00] our attorneys, Paul Belling is his name, uh, he’s now living in Germany. He’s got a great life there. I loved doing his voice. He said, uh, Chuck, now you can’t sell this stuff. He said, you’re going to kill people. I said, if people are brave enough to put wooden boards on their feet and go down a mountain full of ice, I mean, how am I, how is what I’m doing going to kill them?

Come on, you can’t do it. Liability, liability. You should never listen to lawyers. I probably should have taken this 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 U. S. Olympic luge team with some of our fast technology years and years ago.

And of course, our logo has appeared on all these, our logos appeared on the Brumos race cars. The logos were on the, uh, Seffen Marine. Then, my wife is an avid horse lover, and we woke up one morning and she said, you know, we make [00:45:00] all these great products. Why don’t we make something for the horses?

Crew Chief Eric: So you’re talking saddle waxes and other things?

Oh,

Chuck Bennett: we already had those products. We already had leather cleaners, leather conditioners. She was more interested in hoof care. She was interested in shampoos. She was interested in conditioners, coat conditioners, mane 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. They park themselves on horses here. I mean, it’s crazy. And then, of course, you’ve got cows everywhere.

Cows breed flies. It’s incredible. We found out very quickly that we couldn’t actually make any products that would repel flies. You [00:46:00] 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 a chrysanthemum and you go ahead and process it by squeezing out the essence of, uh, in the chrysanthemums, And then go ahead and distill that you end up with something called pyrethrins when the majority of pyrethrins are garnered from chrysanthemums and the flowers of chrysanthemums.

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 pyrethrins, but we do have extract of chrysanthemum 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 [00:47:00] after it’s done getting waxed, it wants to roll over on its back in the nearest mud puddle. Which is what it’s supposed to go. 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 that they, they tried it on some of the, the Bobby’s police horses. And then we brought it over to Ireland to, um, uh, Ben and breakfast there called Puddin 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, with our horse care products. Our horse care products are called equine skies.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, interesting.

Chuck Bennett: 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 surfaces on the planet.

I’ll never be able to go after all,

Crew Chief Eric: 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 [00:48:00] into, but I want to 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 is important as the wax. And what’s The best or proper way to really wash a car 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.

Chuck Bennett: 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 BM bmw, October Fest. Anytime we’ve gone to a car club. We’ve done an event, StarFest. There’s an event that we’ve always done, which I know Tonya 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 [00:49:00] ice cream sundaes for everybody.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m digging this. Yeah, so everyone’s

Chuck Bennett: sitting there with these ice cream sundaes.

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 want to kick everybody’s endorphins through the roof. Don’t put in that elbow

Crew Chief Eric: grease, right?

Chuck Bennett: 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 in it, which will put all kinds of interesting patterns on your car, that within, um, 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 suds. [00:50:00] You need a good car wash product that doesn’t try and shine the car. at the same time. Products that are out there to try and shine a car at the same time. Generally have anywhere between a 20, 000 centistoke to a 50, 000 centistoke silicone blended into the soap.

You don’t 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, I need to find a way to grind it all up and use some of that soap with a couple of tablespoons of salad oil in the wash water.

Crew Chief Eric: Interesting. So cheese grater and some olive oil here. We’re making olive oil. Ivory just

Executive Producer Tania: came out recently, a liquid form of ivory soap.

Chuck Bennett: I know we’ve got it, but [00:51:00] 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 percent pure. That’s why the ivory bar would float in water is that it was pure tallow. And they got it to become a soap by using lye in the mix with the tallow, 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 towel. 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.

Crew Chief Eric: Would you recommend that even for the Zymo Auto Wash? I would.

Chuck Bennett: I would. And the reason why? Is 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.

Crew Chief Eric: So I’ve heard the same thing from detailers saying that if [00:52:00] you use the old tide.

Powdered 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 paint.

Chuck Bennett: 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 it to the young fellow 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 cobwebbing all over the car. I told him, I said, you need to First things first, you need to get that sealant off the car. You go to your laundromat, buy a couple boxes of Tide soap from the laundromat.

The small boxes, you take the two boxes, mix them in a five gallon pail of water and wash the car with Tide. Tide is extremely strong. And it has a lot of phosphates, so it’ll crack silicone, you’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.

Crew Chief Eric: Love the smell of it, by the way. It’s fantastic.

Chuck Bennett: It has [00:53:00] coconut oil, it has banana oil in it. We’ve gone ahead. and try 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 got to moisturize your hands for the next three weeks.

There’s a lot of car washes that’ll do that. It’s the pH of our car wash is somewhere around A six and a half, considering that your water in most towns, most cities is anywhere near an eight is made on the scale of the PHQ is a little bit on the alkaline side, you’re going to balance that out and hopefully get you close to a seven.

Alright, so now we’ve got the salad 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 move to that part, or a hood, and you use your bare hand and you run your bare hand over the car first.

Touch the car with the [00:54:00] sponge. Use your bare hand. But you want to find if things stuck to the paint. That bug protein is a wonderful glue for taking a small stone and gluing it to the top of your car or a fender on your car. And there you go, giving archaeologists a time again, trying to figure out what the hell you wrote on your car.

2000 years ago. Because 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’ve 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 rinsed 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. Then I move down, and I move down to the hood. Do half the hood. And I rinse the entire car.

You keep rinsing the entire car. Every time you [00:55:00] wash something on the car, rinse the entire car. Remember that this hand, if you’re left or right handed, is the hands, the magic hand. That’s the hand that’s going to tell you what’s stuck to that paint surface, or where you’ve got some damage, or where you have to be careful, or what needs some special attention.

It’s a simple way to wash a car. It always top down. And when you get to the belt line, that’s the beginning of the rocker panels, you get to the belt line. At that point, you change your water. You change your sponge. And you go to a new water, new sponge, and a little more carwash mixed in. It’s got to be just a tad stronger.

What you’re really trying to get off that paint surface, and you’ve got to 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 cars is the catalytic converter of the car in front of you. American cars are very interesting.

They [00:56:00] 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 that Suburban and you’re on the 405 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 got to get that stuff off of there because when it dries, it’s not active anymore. The moment that it gets moist again, The moment you get some dew, the moment 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.

Executive Producer Tania: So I’m hearing you’re not a [00:57:00] fan of car washes.

Chuck Bennett: Well, I got in a lot of trouble. I got in a lot of trouble. I’ve been interviewed a lot on about different magazines. I’ve been on air with different radio shows.

I could ask that question. Chuck, what do you think of automated car washes? I said, well, there’s a lot of automated car washes that use different kinds of soaps, different kinds of cleaners. One that really, that really stands out in my mind is the car wash that doesn’t use any soap. It’s 100 percent 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 or 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 sandblasting 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. [00:58:00] 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 car wash when they realize that it didn’t do a good job, the ones that really do clean the car are using different kinds of 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 at home when they wash their car. They go and they grab that stuff on the kitchen sink.

Executive Producer Tania: One safe for ducks.

Chuck Bennett: One safe for ducks.

Executive Producer Tania: The blue, the blue stuff. Yeah.

Chuck Bennett: The blue stuff. There’s, what is it?

There’s joy. There’s

Executive Producer Tania: uh, gone.

Chuck Bennett: Ajax. Yeah. All right. It’s interesting about Zymol Wax. Zymol Wax is made from fats and oils. Carnalba is a low density lipoprotein. It is a fat. It’s a solid fat, but it’s a fat. Coconut oil, banana oil, orange oil, any of these oils. These [00:59:00] are fats and oils. Now, that stuff that’s sitting on your sink, what is it designed to remove from your dishes?

Crew Chief Eric: Grease, fats, and

Chuck Bennett: oil. So, wait a minute, if I take this stuff out to my car, if I’ve just spent all that money on Zymo, and I wax the car, and I want to wash it, and I go grab that Dawn, yeah, I’m not going to hurt any ducks, I’m going to grab the Dawn, and I’m going to go out there, and I’m going to put that Dawn on my car, and I’m going to wash it, and then I’m going to call Zymo and say, I got a problem that it doesn’t beat up anymore.

You know what our people have been trying to do? What did you wash your car with? First question out of our customer service. What did you wash your car with? That is the

Crew Chief Eric: 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,

Chuck Bennett: yeah, I mean, it’s very interesting.

People sort of get disassociated with what the right thing to do is. And that’s, I don’t know why that happens, but You know, maybe it’s just that they’re expecting miracles to happen all at one [01:00:00] time very quickly. First of all, the W in wax means work.

That’s what that W means. Okay. You’ve got to be ready to go and work on your car. We have customers, many, many 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 going to go spend time commuting with their car.

They’re going to go into their garage, put on some music, they’re going to break open a bottle of Pinot Noir. They’re going to work on their car for four hours. They’re going to 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, do you like your car? Yeah, I like this car. Do you love your car? Uh, I don’t know. People are nervous about saying, yeah, I love that car. You know, I absolutely love it. I’ve got a car that I love. I’ve got a, a 1990 500 [01:01:00] SL panoramic. It’s got a glass roof. I bought it off of a friend of mine. We 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 car. But I love that. And that car loves me. I know it. And cars have personalities and some of them have quirks. Some of them, hell I’ve got a 1984 Mercedes Benz, one 90 E 2.

3 16. Oh, my wife can’t start that car. Won’t start for her. I walk out there, I talk to her, I rubber fend her. I sit down, I tell her how beautiful she is and how I’ve missed her

Crew Chief Eric: all this while the fuel pump is priming. But yeah, go ahead.

Chuck Bennett: Yeah. And I turned the key and I can hear the cold start valve clicking away and I turned the key and fired her up.

There we go. Going back to what we talked about, washing the car. It’s the simplest and the most important protection you can [01:02:00] 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 of your mind. You’re going to make a wax that has no petrochemicals, that doesn’t have any petrol solvents at all. No, we are going to make a cleaner wax that’s water based. At all. You can’t make a water based, what are you, out of your mind?

Well, 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 SiO2 to it. SiO2 is one of those magic, it’s not a word, it’s a, it’s a, a naming convention for, A product which is actually fused silica and the fused silica has been ground to nano size.

Well, I will say this, I’m going to get a lot of people that are going to react to this. All of those so called ceramic coatings for cars [01:03:00] are Yes, they’re not real, but they’re just not real product. And they claimed me to have the SIO two in the product. And that was, 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. If 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 SiO2 stick to a paint surface.

What you can do is you can take 60, 000 or 300, 000 centistokes 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 pad buffer and have them burnish that stuff into your paint surface.

Not cool. Because at that point, that silicone heats up enough, it [01:04:00] 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. It’s 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. 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 SiO2 and HD cleanse, fabulous polishing agent, and by the way, the particles are nano sized and it does an incredible job.

It’s scary when you think about what companies do to create product. We call it SSDC. Same ship, 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 60s. Back when cars were getting waxed, cars were painted.

They didn’t have enamel paints. Cars back in the [01:05:00] 30s and 40s and in the 50s. 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 days. 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 are 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 of those guys. We didn’t have any way of distributing those because we didn’t have an EDI computer system, didn’t have sales people. That 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 [01:06:00] 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, 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.

Crew Chief Eric: One of the things you had said to me was, so when you’re done waxing your car, can you see the wax? And that’s actually a really important and yet loaded statement. I know the answer, but I’m wondering if our listeners know.

Chuck Bennett: We’ve done a lot of events. We’ve gotten up and I’ve gotten up and I’ve shown people what Carnauba bricks look like.

Try to tell people that you can’t buy a product that says it’s 100 percent Carnauba because you wouldn’t be able to do anything with it except maybe use it as a weapon. I mean, yeah, I don’t know. The brick. 100 percent carnauba is solid as a rock. [01:07:00] 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 love their cars.

You talk about naming their cars. 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 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 guess I can see the shine.

Okay, so you can see the results of you waxing the car. How do you know when the wax is? Well, the car looks like it needs to be waxed. So you need to realize 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 split and they all understood what we’re talking about.

Crew Chief Eric: It goes back to that magic hand you were talking about. [01:08:00]

Chuck Bennett: 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 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 Zymol 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 want to circle back and talk to you about. You mentioned about Directions. Tanya, it is your chance to try man. Tell him real men don’t need directions.

You know, it’s like, you [01:09:00] know, why, why Ikea doesn’t have written directions and they’ve got pictures on all their stuff.

Executive Producer Tania: Cause it saves them a lot of time and cost in those manuals.

Chuck Bennett: And it doesn’t give them any phone calls. What do you mean? Well, as an example, on the back of our 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 to 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 darndest things. We had a guy wax the seats of his, white seats of his Cadillac Convertible with our Zymol carbon. He figured that if it works on the paint, it’s got to 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 [01:10:00] people make Zymol tests on YouTube and not follow the directions.

Crew Chief Eric: So that’s a really important point that you bring up because I have baked off Xymo products with friends of mine’s that do detailing.

It’s like you said, you know, bust out the beer or the Pinot Noir. It’s a whole day affair. And they’re 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, wait things for dry guys. I’m going to go get a sandwich.

I’ll be back. They’re 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. The finish. You can’t see. Yeah, the car, their car looks shiny. So does mine, but you rub your hand across it and the Zymol 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 into your point, love into the process to get out of it. What you, what you want, but please continue.

Chuck Bennett: That’s right. And Zymol products, by the way, are designed to be used by [01:11:00] People call up and say, jeez, you know, the Christmas or my birthday or whatever.

And I got a new buffer. Can I use Xymo with a buffer? Our customer service people ask the magic question. Are you a technician that does this for a living? Is it when the answer is no. And we tell them, well, keep all the packaging, 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 of detail. He was proud. It was all scalloped. I don’t know what to tell the man.

Crew Chief Eric: Get your eyes checked lately. I mean, I, I will say this. I have used a buffer with Zymo once and I have regretted it. I know better, but I was really struggling with this one car in [01:12:00] 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 a 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. And I had to start all over again. And I was like, now I’ve done this three times and I’m aggravated.

I don’t know, again, it’s one of those things, you know, RTFM, as we say in my world, read the freaking manual. So it’s super important to follow those directions, but I

Chuck Bennett: got to use that. I got, that is great. Read the freaking manual. Oh my God.

Crew Chief Eric: 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 Zymolt feels really, really different. And it’s very buttery. It’s very smooth. The scent is addicting. [01:13:00] 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.

Chuck Bennett: No, there isn’t a quick solution. The difference between going to a five star restaurant or going to McDonald’s.

Crew Chief Eric: Absolutely.

Chuck Bennett: You can get it done. Brick of McDonald’s, but it’s not going to be the same.

Crew Chief Eric: I want to 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’m just going to lob this one up for you. Let’s start with black textured trim. What’s your hot take on dealing with things like that?

Chuck Bennett: One of the problems that happens with black textured trim, if you use a product that contains any kind of polishing agent, um, Even if you use a product like our cleaner wax that has a polishing agent, the SiO2, the SiO2 will stick to black trim.

People say to us, how do I get that black again? How do I make 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 brake [01:14:00] fluid. on that black trim, which I know a lot of people have done. And the moment you get brake fluid on a paint surface, it dissolves it.

You don’t want to do that. My favorite is either Jif or Skippy crunch peanut butter. You need to go buy a medium toothbrush and take a little bit of that peanut butter and put it in a And like a, a rambutan 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, it’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

Crew Chief Eric: awesome. Listen,

Chuck Bennett: we’ve had one of the other secrets to Zymol is you can ice the surface. Let’s say that you have a car that you really want to get an [01:15:00] extremely deep finish on. We did this with a Ferrari Dino and it was in yellow Ferrari Dino around California. It was Bill Weiner’s car. He was showing it at 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 was Zymol Concord 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 them off, took some more Concord, rubbed it on the current, Concord that was there.

And then we iced it again. Then we went ahead and applied one more coat of Concord. Let it sit, took on microwipes and very slowly worked the wax into the surface. We stretched out Carnauba on the surface. When the Carnauba 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 [01:16:00] with about 20 coats of clear, great service, great finish.

Crew Chief Eric: And that’s actually one of the questions I get a lot when, you know, showing off Xymo products as 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 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’re investing. Exactly. It’s super easy. But if you have to work or put in a ton of elbow into that Zymol, you haven’t waited long enough.

Chuck Bennett: People use too much of it. That’s the other thing. If I had investors in my business, I would not make them very happy because an eight ounce container of our wax. Will last a motorsport enthusiast, like five years, you’re going to get at least 20, maybe even 24 full waxings out of that eight ounce container.

A little bit goes a long way with Simon.

Crew Chief Eric: That was the Braille cream [01:17:00] model too, right? Yeah. A little dab will do.

Chuck Bennett: A little dab will do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That is, that’s very interesting. Wow.

Crew Chief Eric: 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 because we’re talking about ceramics and SiO2, but there’s actually something cutting edge that Xymo is putting out there.

So do you want to expand on the graphene wax?

Chuck Bennett: 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’re 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 at Manchester University in England. They were actually able to separate graphene from graphene oxide, which is what’s in a pencil. Graphene is a [01:18:00] two dimensional material. It’s missing its third and fourth atoms.

The military has been Looking and working with graphene, they have made some new tiles for spaceship re entry. They’ve actually made a t shirt that’s bulletproof. It’s a hundred times 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 homogenator. We ordered the graphene and the graphene had to come in in glass containers. You can’t come in packed in anything else except glass. Otherwise it’ll permeate the material you’re 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 [01:19:00] took Carnauba resin, which is from our, our liquid Carnauba, and we homogenize those together with graphene. There’s some interesting things when you put it on a car and we’ve had lots of problems trying to convey what our graphene product does to a customer, because it’s hard for them to understand it.

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 metalized plastic on your

Executive Producer Tania: car.

Chuck Bennett: 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 want to take your paint and you want to take all the surfaces of your [01:20:00] car and you want to harden those surfaces, graphene is the way to do it. And we brought our product out immediately, three or four companies popped up and said, well, we’ve got graphene, we’ve got graphing, they’ve got graphing oxide using number two pencil lead in their product and they’re calling it graphing.

We’ve done some interesting cars. We’ve got a blue three 56 that we use the graphing product on that is staggering. Absolutely staggering. The same owner has a anthracite 9 11 target that we used it on. We’ve used a graphene product on our Ford F 350 Super Duty 99 Dualty that we used to haul around our horse trailer.

The truck looks brand new, literally looks

Executive Producer Tania: brand

Chuck Bennett: new. We’ve got a bunch of people across the country that have used our graphene product. There’s a fella that runs a magazine. It’s called garage style magazine. Have you ever seen it? Don 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 a graphene product on, and he’s still [01:21:00] talking to himself, 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 bank. And by the way, we’ve got an odd name for the graphing product. It’s our atomic graphing shield. Okay. It sounds

Crew Chief Eric: futuristic.

Chuck Bennett: Well, it’s not so much future.

We’ve 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? It’s

Crew Chief Eric: 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 a description.

Chuck Bennett: Atomic, atomic graphene shield. It is, it is an atomic product. It’s graphene. And it does shield the car. There you go. 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 [01:22:00] panels from this company that’s in Santa Clara, California that builds EVs.

We’re going to 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 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. It’s an old british car and it’s as an example. That’s a Lucas car.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s a story for another day.

Chuck Bennett: That’s the story of another day. Lucas, Lucas light switch on, off and 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 new Audi’s, Mercedes. No, the teslas, [01:23:00] 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 able to actually touch the connectors on the battery that runs that car. You’re going to die. No question about it. That’s serious stuff. There’s another separate battery in there that’s designed to negatively charge the body. That’s so in case there’s any leak of any current from any of the batteries that run the car, it’s going to 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. The 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, [01:24:00] in January, we’re going to let that product go to Amazon and let Amazon sell it exclusively.

Crew Chief Eric: So Chuck, looking back over the incredible history of Zymol, 40 plus years now, and the love and passion that you’ve put into developing these products that take care of cars for all sorts of 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 Zymol a try, put it up against the products that you have And remember to read the directions first and, and, and see how it stacks up and see how you like it, keep up with the developments that they’ve got going.

All these new products are fascinating. I mean, they’re at the front end of some really, really cool things. So if you want to learn more about Zymol, be sure to check out www. Zymol. com for more information or follow them on Instagram and Facebook. At Zymol underscore official. [01:25:00] So Chuck, I can’t thank you enough for coming on break, fix, sharing these stories, telling us about the history of Zymol and, you know, sharing your passion with all of our listeners.

This has been absolutely fantastic.

Chuck Bennett: 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, I’m going to talk to that Bennett character because I’ve got a problem with my car. And, uh, we want to hear about the problems. We want to, we want to 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.

Executive Producer Tania: 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.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s right, listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our Patreon for a follow on pit stop, mini sowed. So check that out on www. patreon. com forward slash GT [01:26:00] motor sports, and get access to all sorts of behind the scenes content from this episode. And more,

Crew Chief Brad: if you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about GTM, be sure to check us out on www.

gtmotorsports. org. You can also find us on Instagram at grandtorymotorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, you can call or text us at 202 630 1770 or send us an email at crewchief at gtmotorsports. org. We’d love to hear from you.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey, everybody. Crew Chief Eric here.

We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that GTM remains a no annual fees organization, and our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge. As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies, and GTM swag.

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None of this would be possible.

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

• 00:00 Introduction to Break/Fix Podcast
• 00:53 The Zymol Story Begins
• 01:51 Chuck Bennett’s Journey to Germany
• 05:14 Discovering the Secret of Carnauba Wax
• 08:30 The Birth of Zymol Products
• 28:22 Expanding Beyond Car Care
• 32:49 Zymol in the Motorsport World
• 42:09 BMW’s Call to Rhode Island
• 43:23 Ski Team’s Fast Technology Mishap
• 44:52 Horse Care Innovations
• 47:57 Car Wash Techniques
• 01:02:32 The Truth About Ceramic Coatings
• 01:17:22 Graphene Wax and New Products
• 01:24:05 Conclusion and Future Directions

Bonus content available as a #PITSTOP mini-sode.

Consider becoming a GTM Patreon Supporter and get behind the scenes content and schwag!