We buy trucks in Lillington

The row filed here is the Gardner Quarry, with 23 employees on the MSHA record, and its coordinate lands 5.87 miles from the centroid of Lillington town.

The ten-mile circle around it holds 56 structures, and not one of them is coded posted for load or rated below legal loads. There is therefore no nearest restricted crossing to report, no lowest operating rating and no cap: within ten miles of this pit the road network carries no load restriction at all.

That is a measured zero rather than a missing figure, and the distinction matters to us. The federal file codes restrictions on every structure in it, and 9.3% of this state’s state-maintained structures carry one, so a zero here is a count of none rather than a gap where a number should be.

Those are rare enough to be worth putting in proportion rather than trading on.

This is the sixth clean zero among 784 researched rows that have at least twenty structures within ten miles, and the second in North Carolina in two batches, after Shelton in Caswell County. The two are 110 miles apart and alike in nothing else: a border county and an interior one, 51 structures and 56, a thirty-nine-person operation and a twenty-three-person one.

So we are not going to call this a North Carolina tendency on two cases, and we are not going to tell you the roads here are better than the next county’s. What it means for a truck working out of this pit is narrow and real: route choice here is a question of distance rather than of which bridges will take the load.

Nothing local caps a load here, so the statute is the only ceiling, 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.

One more North Carolina rule is an absence, and it is a checked one: there is no statewide seasonal or frost-law restriction. Section 20-118 carries none and the state publishes no spring thaw schedule, so a seasonal limit arrives as a road-specific posting or a permit condition rather than as a date on a calendar. The same section makes the posted-bridge exception the boundary of every allowance in it.

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.

Two further rules matter if the truck is not sitting in your own yard. A vehicle left unclaimed at a business that garages, repairs, parks or stores vehicles for the public becomes reportable after ten days, and the operator has five days after that to report it to the Division; before a lien sale the Division must be given twenty days notice and the owner may contest within ten days of it. And if the plates are apportioned, they go back to a licence plate agency or to the Vehicle Registration Section rather than through the third-party services that take ordinary plates — apportioned registration is required for a truck over 26,000 lb running in two or more jurisdictions, which a loaded tandem is.

N.C.G.S. § 20-4.01 and § 20-71.3 on salvage, § 44A-2 and § 44A-4 on liens. Information, not legal advice.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the pit 5.87 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs through the Sandhills. 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.
• Are there posted bridges round here I should worry about?Within ten miles of the quarry, none — 56 structures and not one of them restricted, measured around a pit 5.87 miles out of town. That is a count rather than an assumption. Further out is a different question, and the tow is our problem in any case.
• The plates are apportioned. Does that slow anything down?It changes where they go rather than how long it takes. Apportioned plates are returned to a licence plate agency or mailed to the Vehicle Registration Section, not surrendered through the services that handle ordinary plates. We will tell you what we need and when.
• 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 5.87 miles out, 56 structures with no restriction on any of them, or an 80,000 lb ceiling.

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.