We buy trucks in Viburnum

The Viburnum Trend is the Southeast Missouri Lead Belt, and it is the largest lead-producing district in the United States. Six mines sit along it, all six operated by The Doe Run Company and controlled by Renco Group, with 663 people between them — Fletcher 189, Sweetwater 157, Brushy Creek 139, Casteel 98, Buick 73 and Viburnum #29 seven.

These are underground lead-zinc mines with mills attached, which is why four of the six carry Mine or Mill in the name. That is the tightest single-owner concentration anywhere in this research, and it means the equipment around here was mostly bought to one specification and maintained by one outfit.

One thing in the record is worth flagging. The node list files this row in Reynolds County while its coordinates and its own named town both sit in Iron County, so every county figure on this page is computed from the coordinate rather than from the county field.

That ore is what makes the haulage here unlike anywhere else in the state. Lead concentrate is exceptionally dense. It weighs out at a fraction of a trailer’s cubic capacity, so every loaded truck leaving these mines is at its weight limit with a box that still looks half empty.

It is a real difference in how a machine has been worked. A truck that reaches 80,000 lb without filling its body has spent its life loading heavy and low, and the wear falls on the frame, the suspension and the brakes rather than on volume-related things. Anyone who has run one of these knows the difference; we would rather hear it from you than guess.

The stone here is different in kind as well. This is the St Francois Mountains, the exposed Precambrian igneous core of the Ozark dome, and it is the only place in Missouri where the quarrying is not carbonate rock. The rock is rhyolite, granite and trap rock, which is very much harder than the limestone and dolomite worked everywhere else in the state. Harder rock is denser and more abrasive, so a full body weighs more for the same volume and the material is harder on liners, tailgates and tyres. No wear figure is claimed for that — what can be said is that the rock is different, and a seller should say which one a machine carried.

Those loaded trucks then have to get out through the most route-constrained corner of the state. Five of the ten most restricted county road networks in Missouri are in this part of the Ozarks. Wayne County restricts 30 of 69 county-maintained structures, second of the 109 counties that maintain at least twenty. Reynolds is third, Douglas sixth, Oregon seventh and Bollinger tenth. The state rate is 12.7 per cent.

The reason is drainage rather than neglect. Deeply dissected uplands need a lot of small bridges, and a lot of small bridges on a small county budget is what ends up posted. Within ten miles of the crushed-stone operation here there are 31 structures and six are rated below legal loads — all six county-maintained, the nearest 5.80 miles out. The lowest that still admits a loaded commercial vehicle is rated about 13.9 US tons, which takes a tandem dump across barely loaded.

For a truck that means a load here was routed rather than simply loaded, and the wear falls on running gear and brakes rather than on the engine. Iron County itself restricts 8 of 40.

Those crossings are the local limit. The statutory ceiling above them is the same across Missouri, and it carries a provision worth knowing.

Missouri sets gross weight at 80,000 lb, a single axle at 20,000 lb and a tandem at 34,000 lb, and it keeps the federal ceiling in place by providing that nothing in the section allows a load heavier than Title 23 of the United States Code does.

Then subsection 6 does something none of the other states on file do for this trade. Any vehicle or combination running on highways other than the interstate system may go over the single-axle, tandem-axle and gross limits by up to two thousand pounds — and that allowance names no commodity at all. Everywhere else the relief is written for somebody in particular. Tennessee’s ten per cent names sand, coal, clay, shale and phosphate, and leaves crushed stone out. Kentucky’s names crushed stone first. Alabama gives nobody anything. Missouri gives everybody two thousand pounds once you are off the interstate, which at 80,000 lb is about two and a half per cent.

One thing in that section is genuinely unsettled and we are not going to tidy it up. Subsection 6 says the allowance may be taken against the gross limit. Subsection 3’s own 80,000 lb cap is written as subject to subsections 9, 10, 12, 13 and 14, and it does not name subsection 6. Both texts are on the books, and how they work together is not something the research resolved.

The commodity allowances Missouri does write are all built the same way and all stop in the same place. Grain and grain co-products may run ten per cent over during harvest; milk and livestock may reach 85,500 lb; local log trucks reach 109,600 lb. Every one of them applies only on highways other than the interstate system. That is not a quirk of Missouri drafting. Title 23 caps the Interstate System at 80,000 lb and no state can raise it, so any state allowance above 80,000 lb has to live off the interstate by construction. The state route is the loaded road and the interstate is the empty one.

One more thing separates Missouri from its neighbours: it prices an overload rather than stopping it. The fine runs by the pound on a rising scale — two cents for each pound of the first five hundred, five cents to a thousand, ten cents above that. What the section does not carry is a do-not-move rule. Tennessee makes it separately unlawful to move an overloaded truck until the load comes off, so an overweight truck there stops where it stands. Missouri lets it carry on and sends a bill. Those are different risks, and over a few years they produce different loading habits and a differently worn truck.

RSMo §§ 304.180 and 304.240; 23 U.S.C. § 127. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond weight, the paperwork comes down to a single 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. Both are ordinary and neither one stops a sale.

Missouri’s salvage rule is worth a minute because it reaches almost nothing in the stock we buy. A vehicle is branded salvage only where the cost of repairs exceeds eighty per cent of the fair market value immediately before the damage, and where the damage happened no more than six years after the manufacturer’s model year designation. Both limbs have to be met, not either one.

Both numbers are outliers, and they pull the same way. Eighty per cent is the highest threshold on file — Kentucky, Alabama and Tennessee all brand at seventy-five. Six model years is the shortest age window found anywhere; Arkansas runs seven and Tennessee ten. Past that window the Missouri rule does not reach a vehicle at all, however badly it was damaged. For a used commercial truck the age limb is nearly always the operative one and the percentage nearly never is.

The repair side leaves out more here than in any other state on file: inflatable safety restraints, tires, sound systems, damage from hail, and sales tax on parts and materials. Kentucky excludes airbag reinstallation and nothing else. Two states can share a threshold and still be adding up different repair bills.

Where the brand does land, Missouri applies it on the way out rather than on the way in. A salvage vehicle is retitled only after an examination recorded on Form 551, carried out by an inspector of the Missouri State Highway Patrol or by the St. Louis city or county auto theft unit, and that certificate runs out six months from the date of inspection. The title issued afterwards carries the words PRIOR SALVAGE. Minnesota uses the same two words for the opposite end of the process, branding on acquisition; the same phrase means an incoming obligation in one state and an outgoing designation in the other.

RSMo § 301.010; Missouri Department of Revenue Form 551. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule was last checked.

All of that is equipment we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the stone and the ore. Day cabs and road tractors for the runs out of the district. Flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Some of it never saw a public road. A machine that worked underground ran at steady temperature and out of the weather, which is a very different life from one that ran the county roads above. If that is your truck, say so — it is the most useful single thing you can tell us. The Doe Run Company works six mines along this trend, and across Iron County they turn over a steady amount of equipment.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. This far into the Ozarks the straightest route is often that we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, with nobody making the drive at all. We can also come to you and drive it away, or come and tow it, and bringing it to us stays on the table.

• 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.
• It hauled lead concentrate rather than stone.Worth saying, because it loads differently. Concentrate is dense enough that a truck weighs out with the body half empty, so the machine has run heavy and low its whole life. It does not change whether we buy it.
• Mine worked underground. Does that count against it?The opposite, usually. A mine runs at steady temperature and out of the weather, so a machine that stayed inside has had a very different life from one that ran the roads out here.
• 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. Neither one stops a sale.
• Will you really come out this far?We will, and often we do not need to. We can buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting at all, or come to you and drive it away, or come and tow it.
• How far out do you come?All of Iron County and the ones around it, Reynolds County and Washington County included. Distance has never stopped a sale.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup.

Beyond a contract ending, the reasons are mostly personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A partnership splitting and the equipment with it. A truck that stopped earning and has been sitting since, where every month it sits is another month of insurance on something that isn’t turning a wheel.

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. Around the Doe Run workings, and across Iron County generally, there is usually one sitting.