We buy trucks in Kings Mountain

The row filed here is the Kings Mountain Plant, 13 employees on the MSHA record, and its coordinate lands 1.13 miles from the centroid of Kings Mountain city, closer than all but seven rows in this state. The pit and the town are the same place.

Ten miles around it is not all one state. The circle holds 172 structures, 26 of them in South Carolina, so it is built from every state file with structures inside the radius. Of the 172, 22 are rated below legal loads and 2 of those are county-maintained — which can only be the South Carolina side, because North Carolina maintains no county bridges at all.

The nearest restricted crossing is 2.89 miles out. One of the 22 is rated below the level at which any commercial vehicle crosses even empty; the tightest a loaded truck could use is about 24.9 US tons gross, set by a structure 9.96 miles away, against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck.

That mix belongs to the band this pit sits in rather than to the pit itself.

The western Piedmont — Davie, Iredell, Lincoln, Gaston, Cleveland and Stanly — runs 114 of 1,099 nearby structures below legal loads, 10.4%, with a median cap admitting about 7.1 tonnes of stone. The crescent to the east runs 3.8%. So this band is nearly three times as restricted as the crescent and it is not mountainous, which is why we read the gradient across this state as running continuously rather than switching at the Blue Ridge front.

Inside a band the two measures come apart. Statesville Quarry sits on this same band with a network 11.8% restricted and carries the tightest cap we have measured anywhere in the state, admitting under a tonne. Here the count is 12.8% and the cap admits about eleven and a half tonnes. Neither figure can be read off the other, which is why both are on this page.

Both of those are local ceilings. The statutory one is the same in every county, and on the open road it is more generous 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 plant 1.13 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs down the interstate. 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.
• Half its runs were over the South Carolina line. Does that matter for the sale?Not to us. Where a truck worked has no bearing on the paperwork; the title does. The state line shows up on this page only in the bridge count, where 26 of the 172 structures within ten miles of the plant sit on the other side of it.
• The plant is right in town. Is that why the roads are posted?We can tell you what is measured and not why. 22 of the 172 structures within ten miles are rated below legal loads and the nearest is 2.89 miles from the plant, which is a western Piedmont figure rather than a town one. The reason behind it is not something our data settles.
• 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 plant 1.13 miles out or a crossing 2.89 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.