We buy trucks in Bailey

Neverson Quarry records 15 employees and sits 1.83 miles from the town centroid — a real crew on a small town’s doorstep rather than a registration filed from somewhere else.

It sits at or near the fall line, the seam where the Piedmont’s crystalline rock ends and the coastal plain’s sediments begin. East of that line the rock is under sediment and there is not a crushed-stone quarry in our list anywhere beyond it.

Neverson Quarry sits on that seam, 1.83 miles from the middle of Bailey, which means the loads start moving before the truck has warmed up, and the country they move into has no stone of its own.

That eastern run is not obstructed by much. Within ten miles of the pit the bridge inventory records 153 structures, of which 9 are rated below legal loads, the nearest 1.36 miles out.

The tightest crossing a commercial vehicle could use at all is rated about 22.9 US tons gross — a rating for the crossing, not a payload, against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck. So it still cuts a load, and with nine soft spots in 153 it does not cut many of them.

How far the loads actually run east is not something we have data for and we do not claim it. What is established is the geology and an empty map beyond it.

Those crossings sit under a statute more generous on the open road than any other we hold on file.

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.

Beyond the weight table, the paperwork comes down to 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. 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 running east off Neverson Quarry, 1.83 miles from town. Day cabs and road tractors on the longer legs. Box trucks and straight trucks, 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.
• It runs out loaded and comes back empty, every day. Is that a problem?No, and it is the normal shape of the work on this seam. Neverson Quarry is 1.83 miles from town and close to the last hard rock going east, so one-way loading is geology rather than anything about the truck.
• Do you have to come out and look at it?No. 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 is also fine.

Those two come up more than the rest, and behind them the reasons have nothing to do with the fall line, Neverson Quarry, or a restricted crossing 1.36 miles from the pit.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended and left one machine too many in the yard. Sometimes the truck is simply sitting, 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.