We buy trucks in Haw River

The row filed here is the East Alamance Quarry, with 15 employees on the MSHA record. Its coordinate lands 2.45 miles from the centroid of Haw River town, close enough that the pit and the place are one working area rather than two.

Within ten miles of it the federal bridge inventory records 181 structures, and 10 of those are rated below legal loads — about one in eighteen. The nearest of the ten is 5.07 miles out, so the first five miles in any direction carry nothing that a loaded truck has to work around.

The tightest of the ten that a commercial vehicle could use at all is rated about 28 US tons gross, against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck. It is a mild network with one real constraint on it, and that constraint is five miles from where the loads start.

That shape is the crescent’s rather than this quarry’s.

This is the Piedmont urban crescent, the belt of cities running north-east from Charlotte through Greensboro and Winston-Salem to Burlington and Raleigh, where about two thirds of the state lives. The rock is the crystalline granite, gneiss, schist and diabase of the Carolina terrane, and the pits sit inside or beside the markets they supply — which is why a ten-mile circle here holds 181 structures where one on the coastal plain holds sixty.

Two consequences follow for a used machine. A metropolitan market builds all year, so the hours came evenly rather than in summer bursts. And the hauls are short and repeated into dense traffic, which puts brakes, clutch, suspension and tyres ahead of the engine. Across the twenty crescent pits measured, every binding cap falls between 13.6 and 27.2 tonnes, so the tightest relevant crossing cuts the load at all of them. Here it cuts it by about a third, at a crossing 5.07 miles from the pit that a legal 80,000 lb truck cannot take whole.

Those caps are the local ceiling. The statutory one is the same in every county of this state, 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.

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 runs the opposite way from the states either side of it. For a vehicle up to and including six model years old the test is a straight seventy-five per cent. For one more than six model years old the same test applies, but the cost of replacing the air bag restraint system is left out of the repair figure — so the older truck gets the narrower basis and is branded less readily, where Missouri and Tennessee simply switch the rule off past a certain age.

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 the pit 2.45 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs through the crescent. 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, 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.
• The stone business round here is two big names. Does that change what you will buy?Not at all. Nineteen of the twenty crescent pits we measured are held by two international producers, with one local company, Alamance Aggregates, holding the twentieth — so a fleet here was probably specified nationally. That is background on how a machine was kept, not a condition of sale.
• Nothing near me is posted. Does that make the truck easier to move?It makes the tow simpler, yes. The nearest restricted crossing to the pit is 5.07 miles away and only 10 of the 181 structures within ten miles are rated below legal loads, so most routes out of here are open. None of that is something you have to work out — we do.
• 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 come up most, and behind them the reasons have nothing to do with a quarry 2.45 miles up the road or a crossing 5.07 miles past it.

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.