We buy trucks in Asheville

Asheville is the one place in this lane where both things are true at once. The network is the size of a city’s — 344 structures within ten miles of North Buncombe Quarry, comparable with High Point or Winston-Salem — and the restriction rate is the mountains’. Thirty-six of those structures are rated below legal loads, and the nearest is three-quarters of a mile out.

On the urban belt east of here the same-sized network runs around four per cent restricted. Here it is 10.5. That is a city’s spread of roads carrying a mountain county’s limits, and it is a combination we have not measured anywhere else in North Carolina.

The quarry itself records 22 employees and sits 8.06 miles from the centroid. The rail row, under Norfolk Southern, sits 0.30 miles out — one of only three rail rows in this state filed inside a third of a mile of the centre it belongs to. What it handles could not be determined from any source read for this batch.

Those two facts pull in opposite directions, and a machine here ends up carrying both. City work means short repeated runs, stop-start traffic and a lot of idling the odometer never records, which puts wear into brakes, clutch, suspension and tyres before it reaches the engine.

Mountain work adds grades and partial loading. The tightest crossing a commercial vehicle could use at all near North Buncombe Quarry is rated about 16 US tons gross — that is a rating for the crossing, not a payload, and a legal 80,000 lb truck grosses forty. So a full load and a short route are frequently not available at the same time.

The season is the third part. Winter closes mountain construction for months, so hours here came in bursts rather than evenly across the year. None of that is a fault in a truck. It is a description of the work, and it is why we ask about hours rather than reading the odometer and stopping there.

That partial loading runs straight into how the statute is drafted.

N.C.G.S. section 20-118 sets 20,000 lb on a single axle and 38,000 lb on a tandem, with gross weight varying by axle-group distance up to 80,000 lb. The tandem figure is the one to notice. Every other state we have read carries 34,000 lb there, so North Carolina allows four thousand pounds more on a tandem than Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Missouri, Ohio or Pennsylvania. On a dense load that is the limb that binds, which makes an identical 80,000 lb ceiling mean more here than it does elsewhere.

The same section grants a ten per cent tolerance on axle-group weights, and then writes down exactly what the tolerance does not reach: not the single-axle limit, not the tandem limit, not the 80,000 lb gross, not a posted bridge, and not the interstate system. It adds that no tolerance on those axle figures shall be granted administratively or otherwise. So it attaches to the axle-group table and to nothing else.

There is also an agricultural exemption with a distance on it. A vehicle carrying agriculture, dairy or crop products from a farm or holding facility to a processing plant, feed mill or market is outside the weight limits within 150 miles of the point of origination.

N.C.G.S. § 20-118. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the statute was last read for this batch.

Which lands badly here in particular. The ten per cent axle-group tolerance is the relief most likely to help a dense load, and it is unavailable on posted bridges and unavailable on the interstate system. Thirty-six restricted crossings sit inside ten miles of the quarry, and the interstate is how a load leaves the valley.

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

Two North Carolina rules are drafted differently enough from the rest to matter here. The state brands a vehicle salvage where the cost of repairs, parts and labour, exceeds seventy-five per cent of its fair retail market value — and it applies that test whether or not an insurer has declared a total loss. Several states make an insurer’s decision a route into the definition. North Carolina writes the insurer out of it.

The second is a six-year line, and it decides the process rather than the test. A vehicle up to and including six model years old goes through preliminary and final inspections by the Division’s Enforcement Section before it can be retitled. One more than six model years old may be retitled without inspection, and the cost of replacing the air bag restraint system is left out of the seventy-five per cent sum. The same repair bill therefore counts against a five-year-old truck and not against a seven-year-old one.

N.C.G.S. § 20-4.01 and § 20-71.3. Information, not legal advice.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off North Buncombe Quarry. Day cabs and road tractors working the yard 0.30 miles from the centre. Box trucks and straight trucks on the delivery end. Flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go out with a crew.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.

• 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 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. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route. Neither stops a sale.
• City miles and mountain grades on the same truck. Is that a bad combination?It is an unusual one and it is not a problem. It means the wear is spread across brakes, cooling, clutch and suspension rather than concentrated anywhere, which is normal for a machine working out of North Buncombe Quarry, 8.06 miles from the centre, or anywhere else in this valley. Tell us the hours if you have them.
• Do you come out here, or is it a tow?Either. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, or we buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting. Driving it to us also works.

Those two questions come up in that order most weeks, and none of the reasons behind them is in a bridge count at North Buncombe Quarry or in the 0.73 miles to the nearest restricted crossing.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A season that ended and left one machine too many in the yard. Sometimes it is only that the truck has been parked since the last job, and 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.