We buy trucks in Kittrell

The row filed here is the Kittrell Quarry, with 8 employees on the MSHA record, and its coordinate lands 0.20 miles from the centroid of Kittrell town. Only three rows in this state sit closer to the centroid they are filed under: the quarry is the town.

The ten-mile circle around it holds 105 structures and 13 of them are rated below legal loads, 12.4%. The nearest is 2.07 miles from the gate, so the first two miles are clear and the decisions start after that.

One of the 13 is rated below the level at which any commercial vehicle crosses even empty. The tightest a loaded truck could use is about 16.0 US tons gross against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck, which leaves room for roughly three and a half tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare.

That network is the border tier’s, and so is the company that works it.

Sunrock Industries holds three rows in our entire national list — Butner Quarry in Granville County, this one in Vance and Woodsdale Quarry in Person — three adjacent counties along the Virginia line and nothing anywhere else. It is the same shape as Harrison Aggregates at the opposite corner of the state, whose four rows are all in the four south-westernmost quarry counties: a regional operator whose entire world is one tier of counties.

The tier itself runs 68 of 660 nearby structures below legal loads, 10.3%, against 5.0% for the counties fifty miles south and 4.0% for the central Piedmont. So an operator here works a network as restricted as the western Piedmont three hundred miles away and flat, open country in every other respect. For a machine that means route choice mattered, and it was kept by a company with no fleet outside these three counties to standardise against.

Those crossings are the local ceiling. 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 pit 0.20 miles from the middle of town. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs up to the line. 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.
• It was kept by an outfit with three pits and nothing else. Does that matter?Only as background, and it cuts both ways. A regional company keeps its machines to its own standard rather than to a national one, so a truck out of Butner, Kittrell or Woodsdale is comparable with the others in that fleet and with what this market bears. We still buy it on what it is.
• The quarry is right there. Does living beside it change anything?No. The pit sits 0.20 miles from the middle of town and the nearest restricted crossing 2.07 miles beyond it, and neither is a condition of anything. Where your truck is parked is where we look at it.
• 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 pit 0.20 miles away or a crossing 2.07 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.