We buy trucks in Hendersonville

The row filed here is the Hendersonville quarry, 19 employees on the MSHA record, and its coordinate lands 5.03 miles from the centroid of Hendersonville city.

The ten-mile circle around it holds 214 structures and 33 of them are rated below legal loads, 15.4%. The nearest of the 33 is 0.85 miles from the pit, and only eleven rows in this state sit closer to a restricted crossing: the first routing decision here is made before the truck has changed gear.

The count is the hard part rather than the cap. One crossing is rated below the level at which any commercial vehicle crosses even empty, but the tightest a loaded truck could use is about 21.9 US tons gross against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck — which admits nearly nine tonnes of stone, more than the median in the far southwest and more than the Blue Ridge median either.

Those two measurements do not have to move together, and here they plainly do not.

This row sits in the Blue Ridge edge and foothills band — Rutherford, Henderson, Burke, Alleghany and Surry — which runs 172 of 1,245 nearby structures below legal loads, 13.8%, with a median cap admitting about 3.5 tonnes of stone. This pit is above that band on the count, at 15.4%, and well above it on the cap.

The counter-example runs the other way too. Statesville Quarry sits on the least restricted band we have measured in this state, 10.4%, and carries the tightest cap of its batch, admitting under a tonne. So the two figures track each other between regions and come apart inside them, and neither can be read off the other. Both are on this page because a page that inferred one from the other would be wrong by an order of magnitude in one direction or the other.

Both figures sit under one statute, and it is the same one in every county in the state.

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 5.03 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs through the gaps. 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.
• There is a posted bridge a mile from the yard. Does that affect what you will buy?Not at all. It affects how a load leaves, not whether we buy the truck. The pit sits 5.03 miles from the middle of town, the nearest restricted crossing to it is 0.85 miles out and 33 of the 214 structures within ten miles are rated below legal loads; none of that reaches the offer.
• Does somebody have to drive up here for it?No. Up here the ordinary version is that we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, with nobody making the trip. We also come to you and drive it away, or come to you and tow it, and bringing it down to us always works.

Those come up most, and behind them the reasons have nothing to do with a pit 5.03 miles out or a crossing 0.85 miles from 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.