My family has been trying to keep our old cars running in order to put three kids through college. If you're someone who has driven cars with more than 200,000 miles, or which are over 15 years old, you can understand the challenge they present. While this saves us money, it certainly doesn't save us stress.
My 2008 BMW 535xi, in particular, is a special case. BMW's aren't unreliable, but they require diligent maintenance which many owners fail to keep up with. My instance of the car had not been very well-maintained by the prior owner, so I have been playing catch-up with that work for the last three years. While I fancy myself a decent home mechanic, the biggest repair was one far beyond my ability: replacing the twin turbos. I would have considered tackling this myself, but due to the all-wheel-drive nature of the car, turbo replacement requires suspending the engine and dropping the subframe. So, I did what any good man does, I kicked the can down the road.
Procrastination worked for a while, but the constant loss of oil, check engine lights, embarrassing rattle from the waste gates, etc finally came to a head, and I had to decide if I wanted to invest the money and hire a mechanic to do the work. To be honest, one of the reasons why I had put it off so long was that I have trouble trusting other people to work on my cars and my house. It's not that I can do it best, it's that I know 100% what was done and how it was done (even if it was poorly done). In the last year, I have highly dissatisfied with outrageous quotes and shoddy work.
Performing the turbo repair is no simple task, and I needed to find a mechanic I could trust. I had tried some of the big names in our area, but I've never been very impressed, so I had to go into deep-search mode.
One day while searching, I came across "Daisy Import Auto Care," in Woodbine, Maryland. I had never heard of the shop, but I knew of the location: an oddly placed four-corners between Frederick, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. The website was, putting it kindly, simple. It was so simple, in fact, that I almost didn't call, but I'm glad I did.
The phone was answered by Ben, a friendly , enthusiastic fella. I told him what I needed done, and I expected that he would blow me off, or tell me he would get back to me in several days with a quote. Instead, he seemed excited about the challenge, and started looking at parts while we were on the phone. He then did something that no mechanic has ever done, he said, "This is an expensive repair, are you sure the car is worth that much?" I wasn't sure how to react, but this was my first interaction with a man whom I'd later realize to be a bit of a mad genius.
Ben and I discussed the project over the span of a couple days and agreed that this would be a repair worth making. Still, I was going in blind. I had no idea who Ben was, and I had no reason to trust that he knew what he was doing and that I wouldn't get ripped off.
Sure, I checked a couple of reviews for Daisy Import, and it consistently gets 5 stars, but I didn't know Ben, and I was simply trusting my instincts which told me I was talking to an honest man. It was on blind faith and perhaps naiveté that I gave him the green light. I reckoned I had a 50/50 chance that I would get my car back in one piece. This is better than my recent track record of contracted mechanic work; don't get me started on Mr. Tire.
The night I was supposed to drop the car off, it failed to start. At first I cursed the clouds: what terrible timing! Or, maybe it was good timing, since I was about to have the engine torn apart anyway. Ben said no problem, and hooked me up with a tow guy. The next day I said goodbye to my Bimmer, as it rode away on the back of a rollback. I would never even meet Ben before handing the car over!
A few days passed, and I called Ben to make sure that my car was going to survive. He had been working on diagnosing the starting problem with an associate; it was the starter. He couldn't even think about the turbos until he got the engine running, as there is no point in fixing the turbos on an engine that won't start. I gave him the go ahead to make the repair.
A few days later I received a couple photos from Ben of what looked like an engine sitting on a cart. Upon closer inspection, I realized that it was my engine! He took the whole thing out! Going back to my 50/50 chances, I was beginning to worry that he was an excited kid, taking apart an old radio just to see what was inside. I calmed down a bit when he told me he had to replace a trashed rear main seal, the primary source of my oil issues (the other being leaks in turbos).
A few days later, as he's making some progress, he let me know that he's got an auto body repair associate who could fix the messed up paint on my front bumper; a performance machine deserves a performance look, he says. I wasn't terribly interested in spending the money, but my wife hated the bumper and pushed for me to say yes.
At this point, as the repair list is added up, I decided to do a bit more digging. I had been talking to Ben far more than anyone talks to a mechanic they don't know, and I my trust in him was growing. I couldn't quite figure out how I had not heard about his shop. I had been under the impression, based on the website, that it was a small-time auto shop that only did general maintenance for local rural customers.
Being the sleuth that I am, I scoured the interwebs and started to find forum posts talking about Daisy. I learned that there is a man by the name of Ben Schaeffer there, whom the initiated call "the NSX whisperer." For those who don't know, the Honda/Acura NSX is a mid-engine supercar. Apparently Ben is considered one of the top mechanics for the NSX on the East Coast, and has over two decades of experience with high-performance cars.
Here I was, scared to death that I was going to get screwed by another mechanic, and that I would be lucky if my car ever ran again. Meanwhile, the mechanical mad genius and his team over at Daisy were meticulously washing all of the bolts on my engine as they carefully restored it to factory performance.
I could have felt guilty for doubting him, but Ben's humility threw me off. He's a wizard with cars, not so much with marketing and self-promotion.
I have been so pleased with the work that Ben and his team at Daisy performed on my car, that my wife and I cut him a special break on a complete web site rebuild: performance metrics, SEO checks, analysis of competitors, company research, etc. We capture new, much higher-quality photos of his shop, his team, and the work they do. Our hope is that with a better web presence, more people can find Daisy.
I don't mean to wax poetic about Ben and his team at Daisy, as thought I'm a smitten teenage fanboy. It's just that it's rare to encounter people who chase quality with such passion. They aren't just mechanics, they are true craftsmen, a very rare breed.
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