We buy trucks in Scranton

Two operations are registered here. Ronnie Duffield Gravel Company works Midway Quarry on broken stone with five people, 1.45 miles from the centre. Schwartz Stone Company works building stone and crushed sandstone with twenty, and its coordinate sits 0.22 miles out — inside the town rather than beside it.

Twenty against five, and one of them effectively on the main street. Those are two quite different operations sharing a set of roads.

Both send out different trucks, too. Building stone goes as sized and selected pieces on a flat deck, strapped down; crushed rock goes loose by the tonne in a tipping body. The first is a point-load problem for the deck and the frame, the second an abrasion problem for the body and the tipping gear.

Neither is a fault and both are ordinary. It simply means that a truck off the Schwartz Stone Company side of this town and one off Midway Quarry have led different lives, and the odometer will not tell you which.

Logan County posts twenty of the sixty-three bridges it maintains, so a fair proportion of what either of them meets on the way out carries a sign.

Whichever kind of load it is, the state weight statute sets the ceiling, and its sharpest edge for a tandem is an axle count.

Ark. Code § 27-35-203 holds a single axle to twenty thousand pounds and two or more consecutive axles to thirty-four thousand. Where a vehicle takes the section’s axle variance, three axles may not exceed seventy thousand pounds gross and four or more may not exceed eighty thousand — ten thousand pounds settled by the axle count alone, 31.75 metric tonnes against 36.3.

A second limb reaches older equipment. Where a vehicle carries no plate attached by the manufacturer giving its axle and gross ratings, the maximum allowed on the front or steering axle is twelve thousand pounds, which turns a rating question into a statutory one on any truck old enough to have lost its plate.

Ark. Code § 27-35-203. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork is that one sentence.

Everything after it is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither stops a sale.

The salvage rule brands a vehicle where it is water-damaged as the rule defines that — a limb of its own, needing no percentage — or where other damage reaches seventy per cent of average retail value in a pricing guide the Commissioner has approved. It does not apply to vehicles more than seven model years old before the year of the occurrence that caused the damage, which is most of what we buy.

Arkansas DFA administrative rule 006.05 2007-8, read alongside § 27-35-203. Information, not legal advice.

None of that narrows what we will look at. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers, flatbeds, farm trucks and grain hauls, tankers, rollbacks, service bodies, day cabs and road tractors, box trucks and straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not a Logan County speciality — they are everywhere. They are on the list because we buy them here too.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. Most of what turns up comes off one of the two stone yards — Midway Quarry or the Schwartz Stone Company ground — or a farm lane that sees neither.

• Will you come out to a town this size?Yes, and often we don’t need to. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you drive it to us. Anywhere in Logan County, including both stone yards and the road past Midway Quarry.
• Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Rust is not a disqualifier.
• The engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled out and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route. A lienholder means a payoff and a release, and that is the slow part.
• It is a flat deck that carried stone slabs.We buy those. Point loads from sized stone work a deck and the frame beneath it far harder than loose aggregate does, so tell us what it carried — it changes what we look at rather than whether we are interested.

Those answers matter more than the stone does, because the reasons behind the call are ordinary. Retiring. A medical that didn’t go the way it used to. A yard winding down, or a haulage contract ending. A truck standing beside a shed since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it doesn’t turn a wheel.

Around Logan County and the roads between Midway Quarry and the Schwartz Stone Company yard there is usually one waiting.

Most of those aren’t happy reasons, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.