We buy trucks in Landis

The row filed here is Kannapolis Quarry, with 11 employees on the MSHA record, and its coordinate lands 2.66 miles from the centroid of Landis town — near enough that the pit road and the town are the same few minutes of driving.

The ten-mile circle around it holds 200 structures and 6 of them are rated below legal loads. That is 3.0%, one of the mildest counts in this state, and the nearest of the six is 2.65 miles from the gate.

The tightest of them a loaded truck could use is rated about 19.0 US tons gross against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck, which leaves about six tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare. So there is a constraint here, it is single-figure in number, and it sits well away from the pit.

That 3.0% is worth reading carefully, because the thing it tracks is not the one people expect.

Measured across all 88 researched rows in this state, splitting them by longitude gives 15.0% in the far west and then 9.1%, 4.5% and 4.6% moving east — the eastern half is flat rather than falling. Splitting the same rows by how many structures lie within ten miles gives 10.0%, 12.1%, 11.2% and 4.0%: only the densest quarter differs, and the other three sit at ten to twelve per cent regardless of where in the state they are.

So North Carolina has one low-restriction environment and it is the large metropolitan networks. A circle holding 200 structures is one of them. It says the roads out of here are open; it does not say the county is gentler than the county next door, and this page will not claim that it is.

Open roads or not, the statute 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 2.66 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs up and down the corridor. 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.
• Nothing round here seems posted. Does that make the truck easier to sell?It makes the tow simpler, which is our problem rather than yours. 6 of the 200 structures within ten miles are rated below legal loads, the pit sits 2.66 miles from the middle of town and the nearest soft crossing is 2.65 miles out from it, so most routes are open. It does not change what we will buy.
• It ran mostly local work. Is that a problem?No. Short repeated hauls wear brakes, clutch and suspension before the engine, so those are the first things we ask about. A truck that never went far is a truck we can read easily.
• 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 2.66 miles out or a crossing 2.65 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.