Forty-one on the record, which is a large crew for this state
The row filed here is the Lake Norman Quarry, and MSHA records 41 employees at it — nearly three times the median row we hold in North Carolina, which runs to fifteen. Its coordinate lands 6.60 miles from the centroid of Stanley town.
The ten-mile circle around it holds 160 structures. 14 are coded posted for load and 13 are rated below legal loads, so 8.1% on the figure we report, with the nearest 2.16 miles from the gate.
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. A big operation on a middling network, in other words, with the constraint two miles out rather than at the gate.
Between the crescent and the mountains, on both measures
Those figures put this pit between the two working environments this state contains, which is where the western Piedmont sits.
That band — Davie, Iredell, Lincoln, Gaston, Cleveland and Stanly — runs 114 of 1,099 nearby structures below legal loads, 10.4%, against 3.8% across the crescent to the east and 21.0% in the far southwest. Its median cap admits about 7.1 tonnes of stone. This row runs a little under the band on the count and right at it on the cap.
Inside a band the two do not track each other. Statesville Quarry, on this same band, carries the tightest cap we have measured in the state — under a tonne admitted — on a network barely more restricted than this one. So neither figure can be read off the other, and a page that inferred one from the other would be wrong by an order of magnitude somewhere.
North Carolina weight law
Thirty-eight thousand on a tandem, and a tolerance that stops at the axle
One statute covers all of it, 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.
North Carolina paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
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.
What we buy here
All of that iron is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the pit 6.60 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs into 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.
We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Small things — a missing bumper — are fine.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in Stanley
- 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 came out of a big operation rather than a one-truck outfit. Better or worse?Neither, but they read differently. A forty-one-person site usually means scheduled maintenance and records; a small operator often means the person who drove it also fixed it. We would rather see the paperwork if it exists and the truck either way.
- Is this a hard network to run loaded?Middling. 13 of the 160 structures within ten miles are rated below legal loads, the nearest 2.16 miles from a pit that sits 6.60 miles out of town, and the tightest usable one admits about seven tonnes. That is the western Piedmont figure rather than a mountain one.
- 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.
Why people call
Those come up most, and behind them the reasons have nothing to do with a pit 6.60 miles out or a crossing 2.16 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.