We buy trucks in Liberty

The row filed here is the Snow Camp Quarry, with 7 employees on the MSHA record — a small crew even for this state, where the median row we hold runs to fifteen. Its coordinate lands 8.29 miles from the centroid of Liberty town, so the pit and the place our list names are a proper drive apart, and we would rather say that than imply the quarry is at the end of your street.

The ten-mile circle around that coordinate holds 128 structures and 15 of them are rated below legal loads, 11.7%. The nearest is 2.13 miles out.

The cap is the part that bites. The tightest crossing a loaded truck could use is rated about 15.0 US tons gross against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck, which leaves under three tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare — about a tenth of a legal load, and the tightest figure of any row in this batch.

That figure is the low end of a range we have measured right across this belt.

This is the Piedmont urban crescent, the belt of cities running north-east from Charlotte through Greensboro and Winston-Salem to Burlington and Raleigh, where about two thirds of the state lives. Across the twenty crescent pits measured, every binding cap falls between 13.6 and 27.2 tonnes — so at the generous end a crossing costs a third of the load and at the tight end, which is this one, it costs about nine-tenths. That is a tenfold spread in payload inside 140 miles and one statute.

What that does not mean is that the crescent has no road constraint. It means the constraint is wide rather than absent, and that reading it off the county or the region gets you the wrong answer here. Alongside it the ordinary crescent wear applies: a metropolitan market builds all year, so the hours came evenly, and short repeated hauls in dense traffic put brakes, clutch, suspension and tyres ahead of the engine.

None of that is in the statute, which sets one ceiling for the whole state and on the open road 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 8.29 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs across the crescent. 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 always part loaded on one route. Does that mean anything to you?It tells us the truck was worked within itself, which is usually good news for the driveline. The tightest crossing near this pit admits under three tonnes over an empty tandem’s tare, so partial loads round here were a routing fact rather than a choice. We buy it either way.
• The quarry is eight miles away. Why is it on my town’s page?Because that is the row our data files under this place, and we would rather show you the distance than pretend it is closer. The pit sits 8.29 miles from the middle of town, with the nearest restricted crossing 2.13 miles from the pit itself.
• 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 8.29 miles out or a crossing 2.13 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.