We buy trucks in New Bern

Clarks Quarry sits 5.80 miles from the city centroid and records 24 employees. The rail row, under Norfolk Southern, sits 1.89 miles out and is the only one attached to this city; what it handles could not be determined from any source read for this batch.

The road figures are the story. Within ten miles of the quarry there are 94 structures and four of them are rated below legal loads, the nearest 0.80 miles out. The tightest crossing a commercial vehicle could use at all is rated 27.2 metric tonnes, about 30 US tons.

That is the coastal plain, and its caps run consistently gentle. The same 27.2 figure turns up at Belgrade Quarry and at Ange Mine; Onslow Quarry and Castle Hayne Quarry sit just under it. Four hundred miles west, Tubbmill Quarry in Macon County has a binding crossing of one tonne.

Those caps still cut a load near Clarks Quarry, and it is only fair to be straight about by how much. A crossing rated 27.2 tonnes gross admits about 16.2 tonnes of stone over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem, against the roughly 25 a legal truck carries. So it is two thirds of a load, not all of it.

The difference from the mountains is not that the roads here stop binding. It is that they bind gently and rarely: four restricted crossings out of 94, the nearest 0.80 miles out, against one in five around some of the western pits. A machine working out of New Bern spent far less of its life planning around a bridge.

What shaped it instead is flat ground and steady running. That puts the wear where a long-haul machine carries it — engine hours and driveline before brakes and cooling — which is close to the opposite of what we see on a truck out of the Blue Ridge.

Those crossings sit under a statute more generous on the open road 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.

There is also an agricultural exemption with a distance on it. 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 limits within 150 miles of the point of origination.

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 decides the process rather than the test. A vehicle up to and including six model years old goes through preliminary and final inspections by the Division’s Enforcement Section before it can be retitled. One more than six model years old may be retitled without inspection, and the cost of replacing the air bag restraint system is left out of the seventy-five per cent sum. The same repair bill therefore counts against a five-year-old truck and not against a seven-year-old one.

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 Clarks Quarry, 5.80 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors working the yard 1.89 miles from the centre. 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.

• 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 has high engine hours but the frame is straight. Is that the wrong way round?Not on the coastal plain. Flat ground and steady running put the wear into hours and driveline rather than brakes and suspension, and around Clarks Quarry, 5.80 miles out, only four crossings in 94 are restricted. That is the ordinary shape here.
• Do you have to come out and look at 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 two come up more than the rest, and none of the reasons behind them is in a bridge count or the 0.80 miles to the nearest restricted crossing near Clarks Quarry.

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.