We buy trucks in Jacksonville

The single record filed against this city is Marine Corps Air Station New River, whose coordinate reverse-geocodes to Onslow County. That is very nearly all of what our data holds about it.

Acreage, strength and mission were not established, and there is no freight information in the row at all — no commodities, no traffic, no gate count. A station of that size plainly generates truck movements, and we are not going to describe them, because describing them would mean inventing them.

So this page will not build an argument on that row. What it can do is say what the row establishes — a name and a location in Onslow County — and then go to the measurements that do exist for this county.

Those measurements come from the other kind of row we hold here, a working quarry rather than a station.

Onslow Quarry shows a binding cap of 25.4 tonnes, which admits about 14.4 tonnes of stone over the tare of an empty tandem, against roughly twenty-five for a legal 80,000 lb truck. That is one of the mildest caps in North Carolina, and it is what the whole coastal plain looks like: 4.5% of nearby structures rated below legal loads out here against 15.0% in the mountains, with the caps admitting about twice the payload.

None of that is about the station, and this page will not dress it up as though it were. It is the floor the roads give everybody in this county, and a page with one thin row is better standing on a measured floor than on a guess.

What governs a truck here is the state statute, and it governs every road in the county the same way.

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.

And one narrower provision is worth knowing if a weigh station goes badly. A shifting-load provision gives relief on certain violations where the single-axle weight does not exceed the posted limit by more than 2,500 lb — a recognition that a load can move in transit without anybody having overloaded anything. It is specific to particular violations rather than general.

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.

Two things our reading of this state did not settle, and we would rather name them than paper over them: how a vehicle six model years old or newer is treated on the retitling side, and whether any seasonal restriction applies to a road round here. Neither is something a seller has to resolve before calling us. What we can say is that North Carolina has not adopted Advanced Clean Trucks, so nothing in that programme reaches a diesel truck registered in this county.

N.C.G.S. § 20-4.01 and § 20-71.3. Information, not legal advice.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Day cabs and road tractors off the runs through Onslow County. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers. 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.
• I am being posted out and cannot be here for the handover.Then the straightforward version is that we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, and you need not be there at all. If you would rather hand it over in person, we come to you and drive it away or come to you and tow it. We will not put a clock on it either, because a promise we might miss is no use to somebody packing.
• We haul produce for a farm nearby. Does that change the weights?On the road it can. The statute puts vehicles carrying agriculture, dairy or crop products from a farm or holding facility to a processing plant, feed mill or market outside the weight limits within 150 miles of where the load started. It has no bearing at all on selling the truck.
• Does the county the truck worked in change anything?No. Onslow County sits on the coastal plain, where the caps run among the mildest in the state — the quarry row measured here admits about 14.4 tonnes over an empty tandem’s tare. That is background on how a machine was worked, not a condition of sale.

Those come up most, and behind them the reasons have nothing to do with a thin row in Onslow County or an 80,000 lb ceiling.

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.