We buy trucks in Burlington

Burlington Quarry records 16 employees and sits 2.59 miles from the city centroid. This town is one of the named ends of the Piedmont urban crescent — the belt running north-east from Charlotte through Greensboro and Winston-Salem to here and on to Raleigh, where about two thirds of the state lives.

The rock underneath is the crystalline granite, gneiss, schist and diabase of the Carolina terrane, and the pit sits beside the market it supplies rather than out in the country.

The roads are among the mildest on the whole belt. Within ten miles there are 212 structures and 7 are rated below legal loads — about one in thirty — with the nearest 3.60 miles out.

That said, the crossings still bind. The tightest within ten miles of the pit 2.59 miles from town is rated about 20.9 US tons gross, and a legal 80,000 lb truck grosses forty, so even here a load goes over part loaded rather than whole.

The difference from the mountains is how rarely it comes up. Seven soft structures in 212, none nearer than three and a half miles, is a network a driver can work all week without thinking about. Out west the same measure runs one in five with the nearest under a mile.

So what shaped a machine here is the day rather than the map: a market that builds all year, short repeated runs, and idling that never reaches the odometer. The wear lands in brakes, clutch, suspension and tyres ahead of the engine, and that is why we ask about hours.

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 off Burlington Quarry, 2.59 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs up and down the crescent. 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, and every one of them loads under the same 80,000 lb ceiling.

• 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 never had to plan a route round a bridge. Does that read as odd?Not here. Seven crossings in 212 are rated below legal loads and the nearest is 3.60 miles from a pit that sits 2.59 miles from town, so a truck out of it could work for years without meeting one. It is the country, not the truck.
• Does somebody have to come out to 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 a pit 2.59 miles from town or a crossing 3.60 miles from it.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A lease 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.