We buy trucks in Thomasville

The row filed here is the Thomasville Quarry, with 12 employees on the MSHA record, and its coordinate lands 4.79 miles from the centroid of Thomasville city.

The ten-mile circle around it holds 270 structures and 5 of them are rated below legal loads. That is 1.9%, the sixth most open of the 101 networks we have measured in this state, and the nearest of the five is 5.65 miles from the gate — further out than at almost any row in this lane.

The cap is the middling part. The tightest crossing a loaded truck could use is rated about 18.0 US tons gross against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck, which admits a little over five tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare. So there is one real constraint here, and it is five and a half miles away from where the loads start.

That 1.9% is worth reading for what it actually tracks, because it is not the county.

Measured over 88 researched rows split by longitude, the restricted share falls across the western half of the state — 15.0%, then 9.1% — and then goes flat at 4.5% and 4.6%. Grouping the same rows by how many structures lie within ten miles gives 10.0%, 12.1%, 11.2% and 4.0%, where only the densest quarter differs.

So this state has one low-restriction environment and it is the large metropolitan networks. A circle holding 270 structures is one of them, and that is what the figure here is telling you: the roads out of this pit are open because the network is big, not because the county is gentler than the one next door. Every structure in that circle is state-maintained, as 92.4% of this state’s are, and statewide 9.3% of those carry a load restriction.

Open roads or not, the statute 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 4.79 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs up and down the corridor. 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 round here is posted. Does that make this easier?It makes the tow simpler, which is our end of it. 5 of the 270 structures within ten miles of the pit are rated below legal loads and the nearest is 5.65 miles out, so most routes are open either way.
• It ran short local hauls its whole life. Is that a problem?No, it just moves what we look at. Short repeated work wears brakes, clutch and suspension before the engine, so those are the first questions on a machine that never left the 4.79 miles of road round this pit.
• 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 4.79 miles out or a crossing 5.65 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.