We buy trucks in Fletcher

The row filed here is Hoopers Creek Quarry, a surface operation working dimension slate under Hoopers Creek Stone LLC, with 10 employees. It is the only slate operation anywhere in this lane.

Dimension stone is not crushed stone, and slate is not granite. A crushed-stone pit runs a plant and moves tonnage; a dimension operation cuts and lifts sized pieces, and slate splits along a plane, which shapes how it is handled from the face to the truck.

What that means on the road is fewer, heavier, more awkward loads on flatbeds and lowboys rather than tippers running all day. A truck that spent its life under a slate operation is a different machine from one that ran aggregate, even where the tractor is identical.

That trade still runs on Blue Ridge roads. These counties are where posted bridges are most likely, and the interstates — I-40 and I-26 — are the roads out of them.

It matters because of how the weight relief is written. The ten per cent axle-group tolerance is the allowance most likely to help a dense load, and it is unavailable on posted bridges and unavailable on the interstate system. So the relief exists on the mountain roads and is withdrawn on the two things a hauler here most needs to use.

Slate on a lowboy is about as dense a load as this lane carries. A ten-person operation moving it out of Hoopers Creek Quarry meets that arithmetic on every trip.

Those trips 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 it is iron we buy. Flatbeds and lowboys carrying cut slate off Hoopers Creek Quarry. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers on the crushed-stone work around them. Day cabs and road tractors on the legs to I-26. 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, 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 pulled slate on a lowboy, not aggregate. Different sort of truck to you?Not to whether we buy it. Heavy sized loads on a lowboy wear a deck, a suspension and a driveline differently from tonnage work, so we ask what it pulled. A truck off Hoopers Creek Quarry and a quarry tipper both load under the same 80,000 lb ceiling, and we buy both.
• 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 in these counties. 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 slate, a lowboy, an 80,000 lb ceiling, or Hoopers Creek Quarry.

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.