We buy trucks in Dillsboro

Dillsboro Quarry records 14 employees and its coordinate lies 0.19 miles from the town centroid — only two rows in this state sit closer to the middle of the place they are filed under.

More crossings around it are rated below legal loads than around any other row we have published in North Carolina. Within ten miles the bridge inventory records 235 structures, of which 47 are rated below legal loads — one in five — and the nearest is 0.34 miles from the pit. The tightest crossing a commercial vehicle could use at all is rated about 14 US tons gross, against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck.

The far southwest of this state runs that way generally. At Tubbmill Quarry in Macon County, 45 of 168 structures are below legal loads — 26.8 per cent — with the nearest 0.43 miles out and a crossing admitting one tonne of stone over an empty tandem’s tare.

That corner of the state has its own producer to match. Harrison Aggregates holds four rows in the entire national node list, and all four are in the four south-westernmost quarry counties of North Carolina: this pit in Jackson, Tubbmill in Macon, Hayesville in Clay and Cherokee Co Quarry in Cherokee.

That is as narrow a footprint as any operator on the list, and it is built around roads whose nearest restricted crossing is 0.34 miles from this pit. Against a producer working seven states, or one spread across both halves of this state, a company whose whole world is four adjacent mountain counties keeps its fleet to what those counties demand and to nothing else.

For a machine that means the specification behind it was set by exactly the roads described above — a fifth of the crossings restricted and the nearest a third of a mile from the gate. It was built for this, not adapted to it.

That routing runs straight into how the relief 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 allowance most likely to help a dense load, and it reaches neither posted bridges nor the interstate system. With 47 restricted crossings inside ten miles and the nearest 0.34 miles from the gate, there is very little of it left to use.

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 Harrison Aggregates pit, 0.19 miles from the middle of town. Flatbeds and lowboys shifting plant between the south-western pits. Day cabs and road tractors on the legs out. 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 never once run a full legal load. Is that a problem?No, and around here it would be strange if it had. With 47 crossings in 235 rated below legal loads and the nearest 0.34 miles from the pit, part loading is the design of the work rather than a compromise in it.
• Are you really coming out to Jackson County for one truck?Often nobody needs to. We buy it remotely and arrange the tow, which is the usual answer this far southwest. 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 in Jackson County, and behind it the reasons have nothing to do with Dillsboro Quarry or a crossing 0.34 miles from it.

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.