The Man Behind the Machine

My passion for cars started early, around the age of 4 or 5, if memory serves me right. I used to carry a notebook to school, not just for classwork, but to fill every page with car drawings. My parents would flip through my schoolwork only to find sketches of cars tucked in between. I still remember one particular car I used to draw — long, with an exaggerated number of doors. Essentially, it was a limousine, though I didn’t know it at the time. One of my classmates once told me, “No car has that many doors.” That didn’t stop me.

Even the walls at home weren’t safe once I had a pencil in hand, though I quickly learned I’d be scrubbing them clean once my parents found out. I was obsessed. I could be in the middle of dinner, but the moment I heard the growl of a nice exhaust outside, I’d jump up to see what kind of car it was. My mom would say, “Sit down, you love cars too much,” but my grandma would smile and say, “Let him go look. When he grows up, he’s going to be a mechanic.”

By age 7, I was already in the game, working as an apprentice at George Sherwood Garage on Mountain View Avenue in Kingston, Jamaica. I washed cars, cleaned the shop, fetched tools, and soaked in everything I could from the mechanics around me.

After moving to the U.S. and graduating high school, I headed to New York. I started college but soon realized my true path lay elsewhere. I switched to trade school for mechanics, where I made new friends — one of whom introduced me to a school offering an auto body program. Honestly, I wasn’t that interested at first, but everyone else signed up, so I tagged along. That decision turned out to be one of the best I’ve ever made.

After finishing trade school, I spent a year working in a body shop. Then two classmates and I teamed up to open a small garage in someone’s backyard. Since then, I’ve been wrenching, hammering, sanding, and painting non-stop. I even took a five-year break from the field to teach at a technical school. But halfway through that fifth year, I felt the urge to get back to hands-on work. While teaching, I had begun designing cars in my head, and I knew I had to return and bring those visions to life.

Now I’m fully immersed in the world of auto body work — repairs, custom builds, restorations, you name it. I’ve been an ASE Certified Master Auto Body Technician for over 14 years, and I’m proud to say I’m at the top of my game. While I excel at all types of auto body repair, it’s the custom builds where I truly feel at home. If you can dream it, I can build it.