We buy trucks in Wilmington

Two rows are filed to Wilmington. One is a petroleum port on the River Road tank-farm strip that runs down the east bank of the Cape Fear. The other is Castle Hayne Quarry, which records 29 employees and sits 10.27 miles from the city centroid — far enough out that this page says so rather than letting it read as local.

The strip itself is 3.08 miles long and carries eight rows in our data, and they are assigned to three different cities. That split does not follow geography. Flint Hills Resources and Nustar Asphalt Refining sit about 600 feet apart on the same bank, and one is filed to Wilmington while the other is filed to Belville, across the river in Brunswick County.

No boundary, river or county line separates those two points. What separates them is how each row was matched: the rows carrying a stated city stayed in Wilmington and are right, and the rows that fell through to a nearest-centroid guess were moved off the strip. The arithmetic went wrong too — Belville is 4.19 miles from those coordinates against Wilmington’s 2.84, and Silver Lake 3.65 against 3.39.

That is not a filing curiosity on a page like this one. A tank-farm strip is where tankers load, and if you are selling a truck that worked the River Road terminals, the row describing your end of it may be filed under a town on the wrong side of the Cape Fear.

So we do not go looking for you in a data table. Tell us where the truck is and we will work from that. The strip runs 3.08 miles and we buy along all of it, whichever of the three cities a row happens to name.

The quarry end is quieter. Within ten miles of Castle Hayne Quarry the bridge inventory records 116 structures and only 3 are rated below legal loads, the nearest 6.24 miles out, with the tightest useful crossing rated about 28 US tons. That is coastal-plain country, which carries the mildest caps in the state.

Those crossings sit under a statute 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.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Tankers and bulk trailers off the River Road terminals. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off Castle Hayne Quarry, 10.27 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs inland. Box trucks and straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, 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.
• It hauled product off the terminals. Anything special about that?We will ask what it carried and whether the tank has been cleaned, because that decides what happens next rather than whether we are interested. A truck off the River Road strip and one off Castle Hayne Quarry, 10.27 miles the other way, are both trucks we buy.
• I am over the bridge in Brunswick County. Still your patch?Yes. The river is a line on a map and not a limit on us — our own data puts rows 600 feet apart in different towns because of it. We buy on both banks, and it need not involve a visit at all.

Those two come up more than the rest, and none of the reasons behind them is in a 3.08 mile strip or a quarry 10.27 miles inland.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended and left one tractor 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.