Home, Sweet, Lube Shop

By Tammy Neal
NOLN Staff Writer

Some quick lubes have an interesting beginning, and Center Quick Lube in Monaca, Pennsylvania, is no different.

“I was in the hardware business, and I had been for quite a few years,” said Gay Shinaberry, owner of Center Quick Lube. “In 1989, the house on the property next door (to one of the hardware stores) came up for sale. I bought it and planned to sell it as commercial property. I had it sold twice, but the sales were contingent upon getting the zoning changed to rebuild the property. The lot was long, but it was just 75 feet wide. The way it was zoned, we needed seven more feet to be able to tear down the building and put up a new building, but they wouldn’t rezone it for us.”

In the meantime, Shinaberry had been taking his three personal vehicles to a garage in town to get them serviced. As luck would have it, the garage wasn’t performing up to standards — a.k.a. charging for services it didn’t even perform.

“I started taking my car up to the airport to get it serviced, which was about 30 miles away,” Shinaberry said. “Doing so took about a half a day, just to get my car serviced. I got to thinking, there’s 200,000 people in our community, and I can’t be the only one who’s having this problem.”

That’s when Shinaberry started researching what it would take to put a quick lube in that commercial space he just couldn’t get sold.

“I got a permit to remodel the old house,” he said. “I kept one wall and built the building around it, and then I tore down the parts of the house that were inside (the new quick lube building). If I tore the house down completely, the lot didn’t have enough space for me to rebuild commercially, so I built over top of the house using that one wall, put my tanks and stuff in the basement, and then I was in business.”

So Center Quick Lube, a Pennzoil 10-Minute Oil Change, opened November 1, 1991. Today it services everything from passenger cars to pickups to box trucks and moving vans, as Shinaberry had the foresight to install 12-foot-wide bay doors to accommodate such vehicles.

Over the years, there’s been a need to add onto the original structure to accommodate Center Quick Lube’s expanding business.

“The original two bays are pit stop bays, and those are just for the 10-minute oil change,” said manager Jim Klaas. “We added on two service bays with lifts for inspections and repairs, and we are in the process of adding on two more bays for doing alignments and such. Our goal is to move all the additional services into the other bays so we don’t kill the 10-minute oil change.”

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