We buy trucks in Knightdale

The row filed here is Knightdale Quarry, and MSHA records 32 employees at it — a full crew by the standards of this state, where the median row we hold runs to fifteen.

Its coordinate lands 4.18 miles from the centroid of Knightdale town, and the ten-mile circle around it holds 190 structures with 9 rated below legal loads. That is under one in twenty, which is a Wake County figure rather than a state one.

The nearest of the nine is 0.97 miles from the gate, though, so the routing question is asked early even where the answer is easy. The tightest crossing a loaded truck could use is about 26.9 US tons gross against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck — room for about thirteen tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare, which is generous for this state.

That crew belongs to the only operator in this county that is not a national or international company.

Wake Stone Corporation holds two of the eight rows we have researched around Raleigh, Knightdale and Triangle; Martin Marietta holds three and Heidelberg Materials three. It matters for a buyer in one specific way. A national producer specifies to a fleet standard you may have met in another state, and a single-market company does not — so its machines are comparable with each other and with what this market bears, and not with a truck from a Texas or Georgia yard.

The roads around all eight are the same kind: 110 to 445 structures within ten miles, five to thirteen of them below legal loads, and binding caps between 16.3 and 26.3 tonnes, all under the 36.3 tonnes a legal 80,000 lb truck grosses. Triangle Quarry has a restricted crossing 0.55 miles from its gate, the closest of the eight. So around here a crossing decides the direction out of the pit rather than the tonnage on the truck, and what wears a machine is the traffic it sat in.

Those hauls run under one statute, 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 4.18 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs in and out of the beltline. 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 came out of a local fleet, not a national one. Is that worse?No, just different to read. A single-market company keeps its trucks to its own standard, so we look at the machine in front of us rather than at a specification we have seen in another state. Wake Stone is the only operator of that kind among the eight rows we hold in this county.
• There is a posted bridge less than a mile from the pit. Does that reach me?Only if you are hauling. The nearest restricted crossing here is 0.97 miles from the gate and 9 of the 190 structures within ten miles are rated below legal loads, so it decides which way a loaded truck leaves. It has nothing to do with buying yours.
• 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 4.18 miles out or a crossing 0.97 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.