For over two decades Terry Thain has been up to his elbows in diesel engines. Owner of Moonlight Diesel in Logan, UT, Terry works alongside his wife, Julie, to serve the needs of diesel truck owners in northern Utah.
“We’ve been doing this for 22 years,” Terry said. “We do a lot of accessories and performance—the performance side mostly. But our core business is still taking care of the everyday guy’s repairs and maintenance.”
Moonlight Diesel has earned a reputation for being a reliable performance diesel shop capable of doing about anything you want done to your vehicle. “We do a lot of fuel system work; we’re a Bosch dealer,” Terry explained. “We’re the International dealer for the area, so we see a lot of big trucks on that side. We do a little bit of everything.”
If you were to walk inside the showroom at Moonlight Diesel, you would see one of the nicest displays of aftermarket diesel pickup parts anywhere. The modern showroom also highlights an attractive diesel pickup—Terry’s pull truck—which seems to be collecting dust because he’s too busy running a business and working on other people’s trucks to get it back to competition readiness.
“We moved into this building over three years ago,” Terry explained. “The building we were in was an okay shop but not the space we needed. We do a lot of the bigger trucks, the heavy- and medium-duty trucks, and it was hard to get them in and out. That was our big push to build this new building.”
Since then, the old building has been torn down and the lot is now occupied by an auto dealership.
“We had some decent showroom space; it wasn’t horrible. But we wanted a nice new showroom to display the products we carry,” Terry said.
When you walk through the interior doors into the work area, you see plenty of room for all the projects being worked on.
“There are 10 of us total—five technicians,” Terry said. “Some of the time we could use more guys because we have customers waiting on us, but at the same time we’re just the right size because we have plenty of space so we’re not always moving projects in and out of the doors to make room.”
With the extra room in the new facility, technicians have the space needed so they can have a couple of projects going on while they wait for parts and don’t need to always be pushing trucks out the door to make room.
Although Moonlight Diesel has a dyno in the shop, Terry said he’s not so concerned about how much horsepower a truck generates … as long as it’s doing what it’s designed to do.
“In my opinion, pulling and dyno are two different truck setups,” he explained. “The pulling trucks are probably turning 1,500-2,000 hp. It’s hard to get good numbers on the dyno since pull trucks are geared for pulling so we probably don’t get full boost. There are some big power trucks out there … but there’s a lot more to pulling than just horsepower. It takes a lot of things on the track to get you to the other end.”
Terry may run the business and do the tuning on the trucks, but it’s his wife, Julie, who makes certain the day-to-day flow of business runs smoothly.
“I kind of feel that I’m the glue,” she explained. “I try to keep the employees happy and the customers happy. I keep our business up-to-date on all the licensing and permits.”
Although Julie doesn’t do the books, she still works on some of the social media exposure.
If there was a unique specialty at Moonlight Diesel, it would be in building and tuning trucks for tractor pulls. Although Terry’s truck has been off the track for a couple of years, there are a few trucks that are constantly being worked on in the shop … including Ryan Thain’s truck, Terry’s brother.
“I got really involved in the pulling with the United Truck and Tractor Pullers circuit years ago,” Terry said. “Then I got my brother involved when we built his truck. He’s actually the association president now.”
The United Truck And Tractor Pullers covers mostly Utah, southern Idaho, Wyoming—they cover clear into Elko and Winnemucca (NV).
But other than keeping the trucks competing, Terry said he’s not as involved in the circuit as he once was. Running a successful business offers as much a reward as winning any old truck pull. So Terry and Julie are content to be the best they can at that … for now at least.