We buy trucks in Spindale

The record filed against this place is Lakeside Mills, and its coordinate reverse-geocodes to Rutherford County. That is what our data settles about the site: a name, a kind of facility and a county.

Throughput, gate traffic and the carriers that run to the door were not established, so none of them appears here. What the kind of facility does suggest is the shape of the work around it — inbound crop products and outbound feed or flour on a repeating radius, which our node list carries for mill rows as an estimated 150 miles rather than a measured one, and labels as an estimate wherever it appears.

The same figure turns up in the weight statute for a different reason, and the coincidence is worth knowing: 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 limitations within 150 miles of the point of origination.

Those figures say nothing about the roads, and for those this county has a measurement of its own.

The Miller Creek Quarry And Mill, filed under Rutherfordton a few miles west, sits on a network where 42 of 179 structures within ten miles are rated below legal loads — 23.5%, near the top of anything we have measured in this state — with the nearest 1.76 miles from its gate and a binding cap admitting under two tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare.

That is one location and not a survey of the county, and a mill truck is not a stone truck. But it is measured, and it says something plain about routing round here: on the tightest crossings in this county a loaded truck does not get across, and the ways round them are what put the miles on.

Those routes run under ceilings set by the state, and on the open road they are 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.

A shifting-load provision also gives relief on certain violations where the single-axle weight does not exceed the posted limit by more than 2,500 lb. It is specific to particular violations rather than general, and it is the sort of thing worth knowing before a weigh station rather than after one.

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.

Several things were not established for this row and we would rather name them than imply the picture is complete: how a vehicle six model years old or newer is treated on the retitling side, seasonal restrictions, the posted-bridge list, the lien clock, plate return, apportioned registration and the emissions programme. What is established is that North Carolina has not adopted Advanced Clean Trucks.

N.C.G.S. § 20-4.01 and § 20-71.3. Information, not legal advice.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Day cabs and road tractors off the mill runs. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers out of Rutherford County. 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 hauled feed inside the exemption. Does that change what you will buy?No. The 150-mile agricultural exemption is about what a truck may weigh on the road, not about how we buy it. It does tell us the kind of miles it did, which is worth knowing.
• Are the roads here as bad as people say for a loaded truck?On the measurement we have, they are tight: 23.5% of the structures within ten miles of the quarry row in this county are rated below legal loads, the nearest of them 1.76 miles from its gate. That is one location rather than the county, and it affects routes rather than 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 mill row in Rutherford County or an 80,000 lb ceiling.

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.