Myron Pierce loves nothing better than making a car gleam.

It’s something he’s done – make cars look great – for years, and he’s doing it now with his business, Recon Techs Tri-Cities, at 4193 W. Van Giesen St. in West Richland.

“I love cars, from the time I played with my Hot Wheels when I was 5 years old,” said Pierce, who graduated from Kamiakin High School in the late 1990s. “My first car was a 1973 Dodge Challenger. My dad collected Studebakers.”

Pierce said he took automotive classes at Columbia Basin College after high school.

But he liked the way cars looked more than fixing their engines.

“Through my business, I’ve driven a McLaren, an Aston Martin, a Dodge Viper,” he said. “They have a gloss that just stands out.”

After high school, Pierce moved to the Washington, D.C., area when his mother remarried and she invited him to live back there.

“A friend of mine back in Virginia asked me, ‘What do you want to do?’ I wanted to do something with cars,” Pierce said. “So I went to do detail training.”

He started in Virginia.

Pierce started with a small truck. Then he grew into a minivan. Then he grew into a trailer, making it fully mobile.

“Then I went to a bigger van, then a second van,” he said. “It was a unique business. It was called MJP Detailing.”

Business really picked up, and Pierce was successful with it in Virginia for 14 years.

But he decided to move back to the Tri-Cities in October 2016 to be closer to more family. He dived back into the community, joining the board for Pet Over Population Prevention.

And he started up a new company: Recon Techs Tri-Cities.

Recon Techs is a national brand that Pierce has joined forces with.

“I’m an independent owner, but Recon Techs does the same thing: we want to be your one-stop reconditioning auto shop,” he said.

Among the services Pierce and his staff can provide are giving vehicles a ceramic coating that offers five years minimum of protection with an ultra-high gloss, scratch resistant surface that requires no more waxing.

The vehicle detail and reconditioning business also offers paint coating, window tinting, windshield replacement, powder coating, hydro dipping, detailing, removal of odors, paintless dent repair and headlight repair services.

Recon Techs Tri-Cities also can work on RVs, boats and aircraft.

Like he did in Virginia, Pierce can be mobile if need be.

“Mostly though, 90 percent of the time we’re at our place here in West Richland, where we’ve been for eight months,” he said.

And he’s ecstatic about how things are going. When he started two years ago, it was just him and another employee. Now there are four employees.

“There’s been a lot of word of mouth. I get a lot of repeat business,” he said.

Marcella Gilbert is one of those repeat customers.

“Actually I found Myron through a plumber that I liked,” Gilbert said. “I told the guy, ‘Hey, I need some help with cleaning some of my vehicles.’ He said (Myron) had just joined their small business (networking) group.”

So Gilbert had him detail a couple of their vehicles. She liked his work.

“He’s very professional,” Gilbert said. “He’s timely. And he’ll tell you how it is. Like he told me ‘I could do this for you but it probably won’t help.’ I liked that.”

Gilbert had Pierce do a five-year ceramic coating on an SUV, and she’s been going to him ever since.

“He’s done different coatings on six or seven of our vehicles,” she said. “He also did work on my ATV and motorhome.”

Pierce has caught the eye of car show people too, doing work for car owners for Cool Desert Nights.

He’s worked on a Bentley from Yakima, a Rolls Royce from Prosser.

“But I also can do work on your Toyota Camry,” he said.

Pierce says the ceramic coating and paint corrections are 80 percent of his business right now.

Paint corrections are more common than people think.

“Ninety percent of all vehicles still need paint correction,” he said. “With paint corrections, you have to buffer it out. Every car is different. And it takes time to removing the defects.”

In the Mid-Columbia, where there is desert and farmland, there are two enemies of cars: “Dust on black cars and irrigation sprinkler water,” Pierce said.

Dust is understandable. But irrigation water?

“There is so much hard water built up on cars,” he said. “I’ve had cars in which they were getting hit by irrigation water from sprinklers all the time.”

Gilbert said the water in the city of West Richland, where she lives, is very hard and she’s had problems with it.

But now that she’s found Pierce, she has a solution. “I trust his opinion,” she said.

Recon Techs Tri-Cities: 4193 W. Van Giesen St., West Richland; 509-460-6600; recontechstricities.com.