Northern Detail & Polish

Meet Alex Arnott, Co Owner With Lyndon Farquhar at Northern Detail & Polish in North Bay

When you book a detail at Northern Detail & Polish, you are dealing with Alex Arnott and Lyndon Farquhar, who own the business together and still work in it every day. They were twenty one when they started it, both in school, and both certain they wanted to run something of their own. Alex was born in another city and driven home to North Bay as a newborn, so this is the only town he has known.

Customers tend to name them. One review says "Alex responds quickly to messages and has a great system in place for booking appointments." Another thanks "Lyndon, Alex and the crew."

Car Detailing in North Bay Since 2021

It started with two scratched Jeeps. Alex had a Wrangler, Lyndon had a Cherokee, and a summer of off roading left the paint showing every bit of it. Lyndon figured they could buff those scratches out themselves with a polisher and some compound. A polisher cost six hundred dollars, which they did not have, so they listed polishing services on Facebook Marketplace to earn it.

They never sold a single one. What happened instead is that people who heard about it asked whether the two of them would clean cars. They bought supplies at Canadian Tire, threw everything in the back of the Cherokee, and detailed vehicles after school and after work. In September of 2021 they cleaned about thirty cars on word of mouth alone, with no business name and no advertising, then shut down in October when it got too cold.

The next spring a realtor Alex worked with mentioned a rough shop sitting unused on a client's property. They took the keys on the first of April 2022 and opened on the first of May. A week later the dealership that is now All Roads had them in to clean a batch of vehicles off its lot. Thirty cars in two weeks, and the business had legs. Northern Detail & Polish works out of that same building today.

What to Ask Before You Pay for Paint Correction or Film in North Bay

Ask where the work actually happens. Polishing, ceramic coating, paint protection film and window tint are all beaten by the same enemy, which is dust. At the old shop they were installing film about ten feet from someone blowing sand off a vehicle, and that is a fight you do not win.

The building they are in now separates the two jobs completely. Dirty work stays in the three bay shop, where vehicles are washed, decontaminated and polished and where the drive on lift sits. Clean work happens on the other side, in the old showroom that holds six vehicles, where the floor can be mopped before an install. Your car moves across the building as it moves through the process.

Professionally Certified Ceramic Coating and Paint Protection Film Installers

There is a real difference between a professionally certified installer and somebody working out of a garage, and Alex is direct about which one they are. Northern Detail & Polish are professionally certified ceramic coating installers and professionally certified paint protection film installers. They have also just come on as a dealer for Autobahn, a film brand that is long established in the United States and new to Canada, which brings a network of installers behind the work.

A ceramic coating is not a wax job. Your vehicle gets a deep wash, acid and alkaline decontamination and a clay bar, then it is inspected, masked, machine compounded and polished until the paint is as close to perfect as it will get. Only then does the coating go on, one panel at a time, and the car cures indoors for twenty four hours.

What Customers Say About Northern Detail & Polish

Ask Alex what he would want a customer to mention in a review and he does not talk about the shine. He talks about how they were treated, and whether they felt looked after from the moment they called. "Second to quality of service is customer service in my books," he says.

The reviews land in the same place. Google shows a five star average across more than two hundred and thirty reviews, and what people write about is the communication, the easy booking and the handoff as much as the car looking newer than they expected. If something is not right, the policy is to bring the vehicle back and have it fixed.

Detailing for Cars, Boats and RVs in North Bay

The Restore package is a full interior and exterior detail that runs five to eight hours, because a quick clean up is not what they sell. Restore & Protect is the multiple day version, with the seats out, a clay bar treatment, paint correction, and your choice of ceramic coating or paint protection film on top.

They work well past cars. Boats are priced by the foot for cleaning, hull acid washing, oxidation removal, gel coat ceramic coating and winter shrink wrapping, and they also detail RVs, motorcycles, heavy trucks and aircraft. This winter they are adding boat storage behind the shop. Customers come from North Bay and the surrounding area.

A Shop Built for the North Bay Car Community

The building was a car dealership, and that suits them. Three bays on one side, a showroom on the other, and a glass box at the front that Alex wants to turn into a dedicated window tint studio. Outside there is room for storage and the kind of yard you can hold a car show or a cars and coffee meet in. They are also putting real time into window tinting, training an installer properly rather than half learning it, so tint gets done to the same standard as everything else in the building.

What to Expect When You Book With Northern Detail & Polish

You book online or by phone, the shop runs weekdays from 8:30 to 5:30, and you are told what is happening to your vehicle and when to pick it up. The work takes as long as it takes, which is why a proper detail is a day and a full restoration is several.

Five years ago this was two students detailing cars out of the back of a Cherokee. Today it is a professionally certified shop in a sixty five hundred square foot building with a five star rating. Alex measures all of it the same way. If you left feeling taken care of, they did the job right.