We buy trucks in Bakersville

The single row attached to Bakersville is a crushed-stone quarry recorded under the name Spruce Pine, with 11 employees, sitting 4.52 miles from the town centroid.

Spruce Pine is a real town a short way off with rows of its own, and both of those are dimension-stone operations rather than crushed stone. So the name on this row points at a neighbour while the coordinate keeps it here, and the two trades are not the same trade.

None of that is a defect — a quarry may perfectly well be named for the nearest town of any size. It is set down because a seller who searches the name will land somewhere else, and because the operation here works crushed stone whatever the name suggests.

That pit sits in the Blue Ridge, where the rock is the crystalline granite, gneiss, amphibolite and mica-schist of the Appalachian core and the quarries serve small separated markets rather than one metropolitan area.

Within ten miles of it the bridge inventory records 178 structures, of which 17 are rated below legal loads, the nearest 3.08 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.

That is mild by mountain standards and hard by Piedmont ones, and the working conditions come with it. Winter closes mountain construction for months, so hours here came in bursts rather than evenly, and the hauls run on grades, which puts more of the wear into brakes, cooling and driveline than flat ground does. We have no gradient measurement for this site and are not claiming one.

Those grades run 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.

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. In these counties that is precisely where a loaded truck spends its time.

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 it is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the pit 4.52 miles out. Flatbeds and lowboys shifting plant between sites in the Blue Ridge. Day cabs and road tractors on the legs to the interstate. Box trucks, straight trucks, 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 has worked grades and short seasons. Does that count against it?No. On a Blue Ridge network where 17 crossings in 178 are rated below legal loads and the pit sits 4.52 miles from town, part loading and burst hours are how the work gets done rather than a fault in a machine. Tell us the hours if you have them.
• Are you coming up here for one truck?Often nobody needs to. We buy it remotely and arrange the tow, which is the usual answer this far up. We also come to you and drive it away, or come to you and tow it, and you can bring it down to us.

That last one gets asked more than any of the others up here, and behind it the reasons have nothing to do with a pit 4.52 miles out or a restricted crossing 3.08 miles the other way.

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 ground froze, 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.