We buy trucks in Moncure

The row filed here is Moncure Quarry, with 25 employees on the MSHA record — a full crew — and its coordinate lands 1.77 miles from the centroid of the Moncure CDP our list names.

The ten-mile circle around it holds 123 structures. 4 are coded posted for load and 5 are rated below legal loads, which is 4.1% and mild for this state; the nearest of them is 1.66 miles from the gate.

The tightest crossing a loaded truck could use is rated about 18.0 US tons gross against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck, leaving a little over five tonnes of stone above an empty tandem’s tare. So the restriction here is rare and, where it applies, real.

Those two figures behave differently as you move across North Carolina, and this row sits where they part company.

Measured over all 101 rows in the state, split by longitude, the share of nearby structures rated below legal loads runs 15.0% in the mountains, 7.4% in the foothills and western Piedmont, 4.6% through the crescent and central Piedmont and 4.5% on the coastal plain. It stops falling at the crescent. The median cap over the same four bands admits 4.4, 7.1, 7.1 and 9.8 tonnes of stone, and that keeps rising all the way east.

So a truck working the mountains meets a restriction about three times as often as one working the coast and loses more than twice as much load each time it does — and nothing in the statute changes across those three hundred miles. This pit is at the flat part of the count with a cap in the middle of the range, which is what the central Piedmont looks like.

The statute above all of it is the same everywhere in the state, 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.

It also carries an absence worth stating, and it is a checked one: North Carolina has no statewide seasonal or frost-law restriction. Section 20-118 carries none and the state publishes no spring thaw schedule, so a seasonal limit here arrives as a road-specific posting or a permit condition.

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 more things are worth knowing before a truck changes hands. If it has been left at a business that garages, repairs, parks or stores vehicles for the public, ten days unclaimed starts a lien clock, and the operator has five days after that to report it to the Division. And if the plates are apportioned — which they are for a truck over 26,000 lb running in two or more jurisdictions — they are returned to a licence plate agency or to the Vehicle Registration Section rather than surrendered through the usual third-party services.

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 1.77 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs up to the Triangle. 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 ran loaded almost every day. Is that harder on it?Different rather than harder. Full loads work the driveline and the springs; part loads work the hours. With 5 restricted structures in 123 within ten miles of the pit — the nearest 1.66 miles from a gate that is itself 1.77 miles from the middle of town — a truck out of here was usually loaded to the ceiling rather than to a bridge, and that is a thing worth telling us.
• The truck is at a shop and the bill is unpaid. Where does that leave me?Talk to us early. Ten days unclaimed at a business that stores or repairs vehicles starts a lien clock, and after that the shop has its own steps to take. It does not stop a sale, but the order things happen in starts to matter.
• 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 1.77 miles out or a crossing 1.66 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.