Lyle Schrock stands behind the counter at The Lab, which is made from an old bowling lane.

Text and Photos
By Shari Benyousky
Guest Columnist

Column Note — This is a series focusing on local people and businesses we use every day without realizing their fascinating back-stories. This column usually runs the fourth Saturday of each month.

Lyle Schrock is the repair guru with eyes the color of blue jeans. If you happened to drop your iPhone into a winter puddle, Schrock is also your last hope to save those priceless pics of your kids running through the sprinkler from years gone by. Schrock owns The Lab Repair Shop downtown Warsaw, the one with the bright yellow signs.

Lyle Schrock welcomes a customer.

If you or I had met Schrock when he was 17, neither of us would have guessed in a million years that he could help you get those pictures back.

Back then Schrock was an Amish kid growing up on a farm without electronics. He even stopped attending public school in eighth grade. But, that lack of access to technology became the driving force behind his curiosity and expertise.

At first, the teenage Schrock learned to repair one phone from a Google video, but when friends and friends-of-friends kept asking for his help, he realized the vast need for such services. The self-taught research guru took an Apple Repair Certification Course and learned to replace batteries, recover data, and solder mother boards. He wields a mean microscope too.

Schrock gestures to the wall where The Lab slogan hangs — “Creating Smiles.” His blue eyes light up. “I always told myself as a kid that whatever I did, it needed to make a positive impact on the world. I just didn’t know that impact would be here.” He grins his infectious grin.

Everything about The Lab makes one grin, from the cheery yellow walls to the comfy couches. Even the counter has a fun story. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the gorgeous wood comes from an old bowling alley lane which Austin Brenneman of Six Twelve Salvage and Restoration reclaimed. Apparently, this lane once sat in a bowling alley in St. Louis where ESPN used to hold tournaments.

The Lab is never quiet, even before it opens. When I stopped to interview Schrock on a Wednesday morning, phones in the process of being revived chirped and beeped and bleeped in greeting. In-between a train horn blew down the street.

I asked about their most interesting repair stories and Lyle did not disappoint. “Well, there was the phone chopped into tiny pieces by a lawnmower. We had to Frankenstein that phone.”

“Frankenstein?” I looked up from my old-fashioned paper tablet.

Fee notices.

“Put lots of pieces together from other phones to make it work long enough to get all the data from it. But we did it.”

He lets me look through his microscope and points out corrosion. “Then there was the person who left their phone on top of the car and drove onto the highway. Yeah!” He paused to point out racks and racks of phone components carefully labeled. “Exactly as bad as you imagine. The phone bounced and cartwheeled across the lanes until they ran out to grab it. There were zero spots on that phone that weren’t dented or smashed.”

“You repair gaming systems too, don’t you?” I asked.

“Oh man,” he groaned. “Once we opened a gaming system and live roaches crawled out. We had to fumigate the whole place. And then there’s the multiple desktops we’ve found with cat pee inside.” He shook his head. “But we usually manage to find a way to repair everything.”

Once he learned how to repair phones, laptops and gaming systems, Schrock moved into more complicated items like drone mother boards and farming equipment. Schrock has salvaged PCB boards for combines saving farmers thousands and thousands of dollars. He smiled at the irony of keeping in touch with his farming roots.

At this point one of his lab techs arrived for work. “This is David Krebs. He interned with me from Tippy Valley, and I hired him.” Kreb put on a white lab coat and started checking the day’s orders. “I like to support local youth.”

“Sounds like your future looks great!” I said with enthusiasm, thinking of my own iPhone which needed a new battery.

“I wish that were so!” Schrock came to a quick stop and turned. “Actually, extending the life of your devices is in real danger.” Schrock paced behind the counter. “Big companies don’t like us independent repair people. They want to squash your right-to-repair because they like profitability and not sustainability.”

Broken phone art displayed in the shop.

Schrock had told me replacing a battery or other minor repair could extend the life of a phone up to half, saving a customer up to $500 every few years and, in the process, saving 80% of the carbon emissions from the device too. Win. Win, right? Unless you’re the big company making the devices.

“Big companies want to make serialized chips which are locked to their devices and can’t be repaired In order to force their customers to purchase new devices.” Schrock’s sunny grin had been replaced with frustration. “There are lawsuits filed already. Small independent repair shops may be forced to go out of business. Apple or Samsung will say your data is gone, but we can get it back with a little work. We ask what you want instead.”

Schrock unlocked the front door at opening time. A frowning customer bustled in clutching a broken phone, and even before I had my jacket buttoned, Krebs and Schrock had her smiling. The last thing I heard as I left was: “Of course we can schedule a consultation to help your mother learn how to use a phone. Absolutely!”

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