We buy trucks in Robbinsville

The row filed here is the Hewitt Quarry, with 15 employees on the MSHA record, and its coordinate lands 8.86 miles from the centroid of Robbinsville town — a long way out, and worth saying rather than implying the pit is in the village.

The ten-mile circle around it holds 120 structures and 30 of them are rated below legal loads. That is 25.0%, one of the highest shares we have measured anywhere, and the nearest of the thirty is 1.44 miles from the gate.

The lowest rating among them is far below the weight of an empty tandem, so that crossing carries no commercial vehicle at all. The tightest one a loaded truck could use is about 15.8 US tons gross against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck, which admits roughly three tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare.

Those are the numbers of the tightest corner of North Carolina, and they are measured rather than impressionistic.

The far southwest — Cherokee, Clay, Macon, Swain, Jackson and Haywood — runs 167 of 796 nearby structures below legal loads, 21.0%, with a median cap admitting about 3.3 tonnes of stone. Tubbmill Quarry in Macon County runs 26.8% with the nearest restricted crossing 0.43 miles from the pit and a cap admitting about a tonne; Dillsboro is 20.0% and Waynesville has a restricted crossing 0.28 miles out. This row at 25.0% is in that company.

What it means for a machine is plain enough. Partial loading is the ordinary condition of the work here rather than an occasional one, the hauls run on grades, and the building season shuts for months of winter — so the hours came in bursts and the brakes, cooling and driveline carry more of the wear than they would anywhere flat.

None of that is in the statute, which sets one ceiling for the whole state and on the open road 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.

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.

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 the pit 8.86 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs down the gorge. 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 has run part loaded on grades its whole life. How does that read?Honestly, and it is worth telling us. With 30 of the 120 crossings within ten miles rated below legal loads, the nearest 1.44 miles from a pit that is itself 8.86 miles out of town, partial loads here were routing rather than choice. Part loads are easier on a driveline than full ones; grades are harder on brakes and cooling. We look at both.
• Does somebody have to drive all the way out here?No, and out here that is usually the answer: we buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody making the trip. 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 down to us works too.

Those two come up most, and behind them the reasons have nothing to do with a pit 8.86 miles out or a crossing 1.44 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.