We buy trucks in Richlands

The row filed here is the Onslow Quarry, with 17 employees on the MSHA record, and its coordinate lands 4.15 miles from the centroid of Richlands town.

The ten-mile circle around it is one of the smaller ones we measure in this state: 70 structures, of which 4 are rated below legal loads. That is 5.7%, and the nearest of the four is 1.36 miles from the gate.

The cap is one of the mildest in North Carolina. The tightest crossing a loaded truck could use is rated about 28.0 US tons gross against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck, which admits about fourteen and a half tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare — more than half a legal load, where a crossing in the far southwest can admit one tonne.

Those figures are the coastal plain’s rather than this pit’s alone, and they hold consistently across it.

Clarks Quarry, Ange Mine and Belgrade Quarry all show a 27.2-tonne cap admitting about sixteen tonnes; this row and Castle Hayne Quarry show 25.4 admitting fourteen and a half. The counts are low too, four to twelve restricted structures on networks of 56 to 116. Across the state the same measure runs 15.0% in the mountains and 4.5% out here, and the median cap admits 4.4 tonnes there against 9.8 here.

What that produces is a mileage duty cycle rather than a springs-and-hoist one: long hauls across flat country into markets with no stone of their own, few restrictions and none of them binding hard. So on a used truck from round here the wear tends to show up as engine hours and tyres before it shows up as suspension.

Those hauls run 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.

One rule here is an absence 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 arrives as a road-specific posting or a permit condition rather than as a date on a calendar.

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 rules are worth knowing before the truck changes hands. Ten days unclaimed at a business that garages, repairs, parks or stores vehicles for the public starts a lien clock, and the operator has five days after that to report it to the Division. And an annual safety inspection is required in this state while an emissions inspection is not — for any diesel vehicle and any vehicle over 8,500 lb GVWR, in every county, including the nineteen where the emissions programme runs.

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 4.15 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the long flat runs. 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 loaded to the ceiling most days. Does that show up?Usually in hours and tyres rather than in the frame. With a cap admitting about fourteen and a half tonnes, only 4 restricted structures in 70 within ten miles and the nearest of them 1.36 miles from a gate that sits 4.15 miles out of town, a truck round here rarely had to run part loaded, so the miles went on steadily. That is a maintenance story we can read.
• Does a diesel need an emissions test before it changes hands?No. In this state an annual safety inspection is required and an emissions inspection is not, for any diesel vehicle and any vehicle over 8,500 lb GVWR, in every county.
• 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 4.15 miles out or a crossing 1.36 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.