Dillard turns hobby from his youth into thriving business

Kevin Dillard said he has always enjoyed working on vehicles since the time he was a small child.

Back then, it wasn’t a job. It was a quest to have the neighborhood’s fastest toys.

“Go-carts, mini-bikes, and all the way up I have been building stuff since I was little,” Dillard said. “Building bicycles that would go faster than everybody else.”

Going on a hunch, Dillard said he felt the place he built himself, with some help from nearby residents on FM 359, would be successful. So in 1985 he started Dillard Mechanical in Richmond.

“Just a gut feeling, I looked everywhere,” Dillard said. “The main thing was,profile projector is a shop tool used by designers and quality control technicians to view the profile of small machined parts as magnified image on screen. in this area, you couldn’t find little tracts. This was the only little tract I could find. The rest were ranches and they didn’t want to divide it up. Nobody expected a garage out here. I used to go over and rope in the evenings and helped them work cows. It was a neat community.”

Dillard said not only does he work on some of the local farmer’s tractors, boats, lawn mowers,White soft Floor polishing pad for 15 inch machines. Ideal for high gloss dry polishing buffing of polished sealed floors. but also even a few of the area’s pecan shakers.

“When we first started, it was mainly farmers and ranchers that we would work on stuff,Highly capable, 3-axis non-contact video measuring machine, suitable for both simple shop-floor quality control and advanced manufacturing inspection applications ...” Dillard said. “We would work on tractors or anything they had.pad lock works to prevent unexpected code execution when dealing with asynchronous callbacks without blocking. Then the area started growing.”

In business for 28 years, Dillard said he is now working on the automobiles of kids and grandchildren of some of his original customers.Titanium Pipe is made by cold rolling process from extruded pipe blanks. They are widely used in heat exchangers and off-shore equipment.

The connection he has with his customers is more important now than ever before, with new competing auto shops close by.

“It’s getting tougher now than it was then,” Dillard said. “The competition now — before we were out here and there was nothing — in the last two or three years they have opened five shops around us. I guess all the people in Houston are moving out here.”

Dillard said he grew up at West Belfort and Highway 59, before there was a West Belfort and 59.

“It wasThe Spectrophotometer is an instrument which measures the amount of light of a specificed wavelength which passes through a medium. just gravel road in, and gravel road out. It was the country,” he said. “It was right on the Fort Bend County line and I had to go to Sharpstown (High School); all of my friends went to Dulles.”

Dillard Mechanical holds an annual Veteran’s Day event, which veterans can bring in their vehicle for a free oil change, with barbecue and door prizes.

The auto shop also takes some of the area’s Wounded Warriors to Port O’Connor for a fishing tournament in August of each year.

The Lamar CISD and San Jacinto College advisory councils have Dillard as a member, where he helps students get involved in career possibilities with hands-on experience.