We buy trucks in Dortches

The row filed here is the Nash County Quarry, recording 19 employees and sitting 3.56 miles from the town centroid. A quarry named for a county rather than a town usually means it serves the county rather than the village next to it, and the figures are consistent with that.

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.

So the market for this pit runs east into country with no stone of its own. How far the loads actually travel is not something we have data for and we do not claim it; the geology and an empty map beyond it are what is established.

Those eastward runs meet a moderate set of crossings. Within ten miles of the pit the bridge inventory records 179 structures, of which 14 are rated below legal loads, the nearest 3.16 miles out.

The tightest crossing a commercial vehicle could use at all is rated about 20 US tons gross, against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck, so it takes one part loaded. Fourteen soft structures in 179 is roughly one in thirteen — enough to plan around, not enough to plan a working life around.

None of that carries a county figure, and none exists: North Carolina maintains no county bridges at all, so a ten-mile circle is the only local measure there is.

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 the Nash County Quarry, 3.56 miles out. 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 loads here and tips forty miles east, every day. Odd pattern?Not on this seam. The Nash County Quarry, 3.56 miles out, is close to the last hard rock going east, so one-way loading is geology rather than anything about 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 — the nearest restricted crossing is 3.16 miles from the pit if you are routing a load out.

Those two come up more than the rest, and behind them the reasons have nothing to do with the fall line or a crossing 3.16 miles from the Nash County Quarry.

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.