We buy trucks in Rougemont

The row filed here is the Rougemont Quarry, with 22 employees on the MSHA record, and its coordinate lands 2.36 miles from the centroid of the Rougemont CDP our list names.

The ten-mile circle around it holds 102 structures. 10 are coded posted for load and 11 are rated below legal loads, so 10.8% on the figure we report, and the nearest of them is 4.28 miles from the gate — further out than at most rows in this lane.

The tightest crossing a loaded truck could use is rated about 20.0 US tons gross against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck, which admits about seven tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare. So the constraint here is real, average for its part of the state, and four miles from where the loads start.

That 10.8% is the local expression of something we have now measured across the whole state.

The restricted share falls across the western half of North Carolina and then goes flat: 15.0%, 9.1%, 4.5% and 4.6% by longitude, with the last two the same figure. Inside that flat eastern half the variation runs north to south instead, and the tier along the Virginia line — Caswell, Rockingham, Person, Granville, Vance and Durham — runs 10.3% against 5.0% for the coastal plain edge fifty miles south and 4.0% for the central Piedmont.

This row sits at the top of that tier on the count with a cap in the middle of the state’s range. An operator here works flat, open country on a route map that looks like the western Piedmont three hundred miles away, and we read that as background on the miles a machine did rather than as anything about the machine.

The statute over all of it is the same in every county, 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.

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 2.36 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs south to the city. 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.
• Nothing is posted for the first few miles. Is that usual?Not especially, and it helps. The nearest restricted crossing to this pit is 4.28 miles out, where at most rows in this state it is within three, and 11 of the 102 structures within ten miles are rated below legal loads.
• Is this a hard county to run a truck in?Middling, and the number is the answer rather than the reputation. 10.8% of the crossings near this pit are rated below legal loads, which is about what the counties along the Virginia line run and roughly twice the coastal plain edge. It affects routes, not sales.
• 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 2.36 miles out or a crossing 4.28 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.