We buy trucks in Shadeland

The node attached to Shadeland is a perlite processing plant operated by Chemrock Corp, 3.09 miles from the town centroid, in Tippecanoe County. It is filed as a mineral plant, and the important thing about it is that nothing is mined there at all.

Perlite ore is brought in from elsewhere and expanded on site by heating. The expansion multiplies the volume by roughly fifteen, which is why the ore travels to a plant near the customer instead of being expanded at the mine: nobody wants to pay to ship air.

That volume multiplier decides what the trucks around this plant are actually doing, and it makes this the rare Indiana site where the weight rules mostly do not bite.

Expanded product fills a trailer long before it loads it, and the plant 3.09 miles from town ships it that way all day. These plants cube out rather than weigh out, so the state’s axle and tri-axle limits rarely bind on the outbound leg, and the 800 lb per inch of tire width rule never does — there is simply not enough mass in a full trailer to reach it.

The inbound leg is the opposite case. Unexpanded ore arriving at the plant is dense, and that is where weight is the constraint. One site, two haulage problems, and they are not the same problem: a driver who spends the morning worrying about cube spends the afternoon worrying about axles.

Because nothing is extracted here, the plant also falls outside the Indiana Division of Reclamation, whose remit runs to coal, clay, shale and oil shale. That is a fact about the site rather than about your truck, but it is the sort of thing people assume the other way round.

Those inbound loads run under the state ceiling like everything else, and Indiana keys it to the road rather than to the cargo.

Gross weight is 80,000 lb, single axles 20,000 and tandems 34,000 on the heavy-duty network the state designates. Off that network the gross falls to 73,280 lb, single axles to 18,000, and a tandem assembly is capped at 16,000 lb for each of its axles — 32,000 for the pair. A truck on an undesignated county road therefore starts 6,720 lb below the federal gross.

Which Tippecanoe County roads carry the heavy-duty designation was not established, and no consolidated list of local designations was found. Local authorities may set lesser limits again, and seasonal restrictions are administered county by county rather than as one state season.

The wheel rule — 800 lb per inch of tire width, loaded or empty — is the one an ore load can reach on a short deck, and the one the outbound product never will.

Ind. Code § 9-20-4-1; local limits under § 9-20-1-4 and § 9-20-7-2. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork is one sentence: we need a title unless the truck is old enough that it never had one.

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

Indiana brands a vehicle salvage where repair to a roadworthy state would cost more than 70 per cent of its fair market value immediately before the damage, and the statute names semitrailers explicitly, so a trailer can carry a brand independently of the tractor. Rebuilding requires a state police officer to verify ownership of the major component parts and the source of those parts — a paperwork audit rather than a condition inspection, and a rebuild done without receipts cannot pass it.

Ind. Code § 9-22-3-3 and § 9-22-3. Information, not legal advice.

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

Box trucks and dry vans do a lot of the work around a plant whose product is bulky and light, and dump trucks do the inbound side of it. Both ends of that job are on the list.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. The Chemrock plant 3.09 miles out and the Tippecanoe County roads that carry ore in and product away are where most of it turns up.

• 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.
• It never ran heavy. Does that count against it?No — a truck that cubed out rather than weighed out has had an easier time of it in some ways and a harder one in others, with a lot of loading cycles and short runs behind it. Around a plant 3.09 miles from town that is the normal history. We read the truck rather than the dash.
• Do you actually come to Shadeland?Often we don’t need to — plenty of these we buy remotely and arrange the tow, so nobody has to be at the plant gate. All of Tippecanoe County either way. 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.

Those answers matter because the reason for the call is usually not the truck. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A hauling contract ending. A truck standing beside a shop since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across the 3.09 miles between the town and the Chemrock plant, and out on the Tippecanoe County roads either side, 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. That’s what we’re here for.