We buy trucks in Goldston

Daurity Springs Quarry is carried as a surface operation working industrial sand under Blue Water Industries II LLC, with 8 employees. The other row, Chatham/Reeves-White, is crushed stone with 6 employees, and its coordinate lies 8.04 miles from the town centroid.

Eight miles is far enough to say out loud. It is filed to Goldston and it is not on the edge of it, and a page that quietly presented it as local would be describing somebody else’s drive.

The two are also in different trades. Sand and crushed stone tip out of similar bodies, but the customers and the runs are not the same, so a truck that worked one is not interchangeable with a truck that worked the other even where the equipment looks identical.

Those pits work one of the smallest bridge networks in this state — only six rows in North Carolina count fewer: 85 structures within ten miles of the crushed-stone row, of which 12 are rated below legal loads, with the nearest 1.20 miles out.

Twelve out of 85 is about one crossing in seven, which is a mountain-county rate on a Piedmont network. The cap is gentler than the count suggests — the tightest crossing a commercial vehicle could use at all is rated about 26.9 US tons gross — but that is still a rating for the crossing rather than a payload, and a legal 80,000 lb truck grosses forty.

So the shape here is a small network with a fair number of soft spots in it. Where those fall relative to a route anybody actually drives depends on where the loads go, and the data does not settle that.

Both pits load under one statute, and it is 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. Sand haulers and bulk tippers off Daurity Springs Quarry. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the crushed-stone row 8.04 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs beyond. 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 hauled industrial sand rather than stone. Does that matter?Not to whether we buy it. A Blue Water Industries body and an aggregate body wear differently under different commodities, so we ask — and neither answer is the better one.
• Small place, and the nearest pit is 8.04 miles off. Do you still come out?Yes, and often nobody needs to. 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 also works.

That second question is the one small places ask first, and behind it the reasons have nothing to do with Daurity Springs Quarry or a crossing 1.20 miles up the road.

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.