We buy trucks in Manns Harbor

The single record filed against this place is the Dare County Range, whose coordinate reverse-geocodes to Dare County. That is very nearly the whole of it.

Acreage, strength and mission were not established, and the row carries no freight information at all — no commodities, no traffic, no gate count. Something of that kind generates truck movements, and we are not going to describe them, because describing them would mean inventing them.

Nor is there a quarry row in this county, and the ten-mile bridge counts we publish elsewhere are computed around quarry coordinates. So there is no local road measurement on this page. That is an absence in what we looked up rather than a claim about the roads out here.

That leaves the things that are true everywhere in this state, and two of them are worth having.

The first is who owns the road. No county in North Carolina maintains a bridge: 92.4% of the structures in the federal inventory are state-maintained and none is county-maintained, because the state took the county road systems over in the 1930s and never handed them back. So there is no county secondary system to post out here, and 9.3% of the state-maintained structures carry a load restriction.

The second is that none of that is about Dare County in particular, and this page will not dress it up as though it were. It is the floor everywhere in the state, and a page with one thin row is better standing on a measured floor than on a guess about a place it cannot see.

What governs a truck here is the state statute, and it governs every road on this side of the water the same way.

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.

There is also an agricultural exemption with a distance on it, which is worth knowing on this coast. A vehicle carrying agriculture, dairy or crop products from a farm or holding facility to a processing plant, feed mill or market is outside the weight limitations within 150 miles of the point of origination.

And one narrower provision helps if a weigh station goes badly: a shifting-load provision gives relief on certain violations where the single-axle weight does not exceed the posted limit by more than 2,500 lb. It is specific to particular violations rather than general.

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.

Some things we did not settle for this row, and naming them is better than papering over them: how a vehicle six model years old or newer is treated on the retitling side, whether any seasonal restriction applies, the posted-bridge list, the lien clock, plate return and the emissions programme. None of them is something a seller has to resolve before calling us. What is established is that North Carolina has not adopted Advanced Clean Trucks.

N.C.G.S. § 20-4.01 and § 20-71.3. Information, not legal advice.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Day cabs and road tractors off the long runs inland. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers. Box trucks and straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go out with a crew in Dare County.

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.
• We are a long way from anywhere out here. Is that a problem?No, and it usually decides how this goes: the ordinary version out here is that we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, with nobody making the drive. If you would rather see a person we come to you and drive it away or come to you and tow it, and bringing it inland to us works too.
• It hauls for a farm as well as for work. Does that change the weights?On the road it can. The statute puts a vehicle carrying agriculture, dairy or crop products from a farm or holding facility to a processing plant, feed mill or market outside the weight limitations within 150 miles of where the load started. It has no bearing on selling the truck.
• Do you know the roads out here?Not in the detail we can show for a quarry town, and we will not pretend otherwise — there is no quarry row in Dare County, so we have no ten-mile bridge count for it. What we know is statewide: every road here is state-maintained and 9.3% of state-maintained structures are rated below legal loads.

Those come up most, and behind them the reasons have nothing to do with a thin row in Dare County 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.