One person, one bench

I'm Blake. I fix personal electric vehicles in Brightwood, Washington DC, and I have done since 2022 — a little over 250 scooters across more than 60 brands at this point.

There is no counter, no service writer and no queue of technicians. The person who reads your request is the person who texts you back, quotes the job, does the work, and hands the scooter back. That is a deliberate limit on how much work I can take, and it is the reason I can tell you what actually failed instead of reading you a line item.

How this started

I started taking scooters apart because the alternative was throwing them away. A friend's machine had a dead throttle, the manufacturer wanted three weeks and most of the price of a new one, and it turned out to be a corroded connector — twenty minutes and a two-dollar part.

That has been the pattern ever since. A lot of what gets called totalled is a cable, a connector, a controller, or a wheel bearing. Not always — sometimes a scooter really is finished, and I will say so on day one — but often enough that it is worth a diagnostic before you buy a replacement.

How I work

I quote before I open anything. Labor and parts itemized separately, with both options priced where the choice is genuinely yours — solid or air tires, for instance.

I explain the trade-off instead of upselling. If the cheaper repair is the right repair, that is the one I recommend, and I would rather lose the job than fit a part you don't need.

I'll tell you when to walk away. If the repair costs more than the scooter is worth, you pay the diagnostic and nothing else, and I will usually tell you what the machine is worth as parts.

I work on almost anything with a battery. E-scooters mostly, plus electric unicycles and e-skateboards, which nearly nobody in the DMV will touch. If yours is odd, ask — odd is interesting.

Where the shop is

The shop is home-based in Brightwood, in Northwest DC, less than a mile from the Takoma Park Metro on the Red Line. It runs by appointment: once your quote is accepted I'll text you the drop-off details and a time that works for both of us, evenings and weekends included.

That's also why you won't find a street address on this site. It's my house, and the address goes out to customers with an accepted quote rather than to the whole internet.

The rest of it

I take photographs of most repairs, partly so you can see what I found and partly because I film some of the more interesting ones for the shop's channel. If you like watching a water-damaged controller come back from the dead, there is a fair amount of that.

Ready when you are — tell me what your scooter is doing and I'll tell you what I think it is.