We buy trucks in Stokesdale

Stokesdale Quarry sits 2.35 miles from the town centroid and records 15 employees with the federal mine regulator. That is a working crew rather than a registration, and it is the one industrial record filed to Stokesdale in our data.

The rock is the Piedmont’s — granite, gneiss, schist and diabase of the Carolina terrane. Stokesdale sits on the northern side of the urban crescent, the belt of cities running from Charlotte through Greensboro and Winston-Salem to Burlington and Raleigh, and quarries along that belt sit beside the markets they supply rather than out on their own.

That has a consequence for the machines. A metropolitan market builds all year rather than in a season, so a truck working out of a pit like this one gathered its hours evenly instead of in summer bursts.

It also sits on the mildest roads of any pit on the belt. Within ten miles of the quarry the federal bridge inventory records 152 structures, of which 6 are posted for load and 6 are rated below legal loads, with the nearest of those 1.42 miles out. No county figure appears in that count, because North Carolina maintains no county bridges at all.

The tightest crossing that a commercial vehicle could use at all is rated at about 30 US tons gross — the most generous of any quarry on this belt, where the lowest run down to fifteen. A legal 80,000 lb truck grosses forty US tons, so even the most generous crossing here takes one only part loaded. Where such a crossing sits relative to a route anybody actually drives is not something the data settles.

Two of these figures sit oddly together, though. Six restricted crossings out of 152 is a low count on a small network, and the nearest is over a mile away. Across the quarry sites on this belt, 3.8 per cent of the crossings within ten miles are rated below legal loads; across the mountain counties west of here it is 13.9 per cent. This is easy country to load in by comparison.

Both of those observations sit under one statute, and it is 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.

There is also an agricultural exemption with a distance on it. 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 limits within 150 miles of the point of origination.

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 decides the process rather than the test. A vehicle up to and including six model years old goes through preliminary and final inspections by the Division’s Enforcement Section before it can be retitled. One more than six model years old may be retitled without inspection, and the cost of replacing the air bag restraint system is left out of the seventy-five per cent sum. The same repair bill therefore counts against a five-year-old truck and not against a seven-year-old one.

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

Those rules apply to everything we buy, and around a fifteen-person pit 2.35 miles from the town, on a network whose nearest restricted crossing is 1.42 miles out, that is a fair spread. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the Carolina terrane rock. Day cabs and road tractors on the longer legs. 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.

• 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.
• Will you actually come out to a small town?Yes, and it may not need us to. 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 making the trip. Driving it to us is also fine.
• It has run short hauls its whole life. Does that count against it?No. Short repeated hauls put the wear into brakes, clutch and suspension before the engine, and the idling never reaches the odometer. On a network where the pit is 2.35 miles from town and the nearest restricted crossing is 1.42 miles out, that is simply what the work looks like. Tell us the hours if the machine tracks them.

Those two questions come up together more often than not, and the reason behind them has nothing to do with a pit 2.35 miles up the road or a restricted crossing 1.42 miles the other way.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended and left one machine too many in the yard. Sometimes it is only that it has been sitting since the last job, 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.