We buy trucks in Hickory

The quarry filed to Hickory records 15 employees and sits 1.84 miles from the city centroid, which is about as close as a working pit gets to a town on this site. The rail row, Oyama, runs under Norfolk Southern 2.47 miles out and is the only one attached to this city.

What moves through Oyama could not be determined from any source read for this batch, and this page does not fill it in. The rock is the Piedmont’s crystalline granite, gneiss, schist and diabase, worked on the western end of the urban belt that runs from Charlotte up through Greensboro to Burlington.

Being on the western end of that belt turns out to matter, and the bridge figures are where it shows.

Within ten miles of the quarry the bridge inventory records 205 structures, of which 19 are rated below legal loads, the nearest 3.07 miles out. That is 9.3 per cent.

Neither distribution owns that figure. Out on the urban belt the rate runs around 3.8 per cent; across the Blue Ridge counties it is 13.9. Hickory sits between them, which is what a boundary between two physiographic provinces should look like from the road data rather than from a map.

The cap follows the same middle course. The tightest crossing a commercial vehicle could use at all is rated about 20.9 US tons gross, against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck — so it cuts a load, but not the way a fifteen-ton mountain crossing does. A machine working out of here met restrictions often enough to plan around and not so often that planning around them was the job.

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 off the pit 1.84 miles from town. Day cabs and road tractors working the Norfolk Southern end at Oyama. 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.
• Half its work was up the mountain and half was down the belt. Which counts?Both, and it is a common pattern here — 9.3 per cent of crossings within ten miles are rated below legal loads, which is squarely between the two, and the pit itself is 1.84 miles from town. Mixed duty spreads the wear rather than concentrating it, and that is not a fault.
• 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, and Oyama is 2.47 miles from the middle of town if that helps you picture it.

Those two come up more than the rest, and none of the reasons behind them is in a bridge count, the 3.07 miles to the nearest restricted crossing, or the 2.47 miles out to Oyama.

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.