Smith County
A zinc mine, and it is not the one people mean
There is an underground zinc mine here with thirty people on it, MSHA-active since October 2009, operator Crucible MTN. It belongs to Korea Zinc, which is the same parent that holds the mines in east Tennessee.
It is not the same ore body. This is the CENTRAL Tennessee zinc district, a separate deposit about a hundred miles west of the eastern one, and the two are not one industry with two addresses.
The distinction matters for freight rather than for geology. Gordonsville is nearer Nashville than Knoxville, so the two districts sit in different metropolitan catchments entirely: different customers, different haul roads, different traffic. A truck out of Smith County and a truck out of the eastern mines share an owner and almost nothing else.
The other row here
A plant is not a pit, and the coding says which
The second operation under Gordonsville is a Rogers Group aggregate plant with ten people, approved for state highway work and matched to the register at 0.05 miles — and MSHA codes it Facility rather than Surface.
That is a real distinction and it is the only evidence in the data that the question arises here. A Facility is a plant, terminal or loadout: material arrives already extracted. So a machine that worked it had no pit haul at all — no haul-road impact, no rock falling on the body from a shovel, no tyre cuts off a muck pile.
It accumulates road miles and yard manoeuvring hours instead. A machine off a pit has all four of those and a machine off a plant has none, and the node record does not separate them. So a seller should say which.
The road network
Half the postings here are county-maintained
Both operations run over a network that puts its restrictions where a small operator feels them. Within 10 miles of the Rogers Group plant the inventory records 193 structures, 21 of them posted and 11 county-maintained — more than half.
Smith County posts 10 of its 109 county-maintained bridges, 9.2 per cent, a little under the statewide county rate of 12.9. The nearest posting is 2.3 miles out and the lowest raw rating is 2.9 metric tonnes, which is far below an empty tandem dump and so not a crossing anything commercial uses.
The cap that actually binds a loaded truck is 11.0 tonnes — the lowest figure that can bind at all, because an empty tandem already weighs about that. On a route with that crossing on it a loaded vehicle does not go, and around Smith County that route is a county road rather than a highway.
FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Tennessee file, items 21, 41, 64 and 70. Operating rating is the gross weight of the rating vehicle.
Tennessee weight law
Eleven trades get a margin on the weighing
Those crossings sit on top of a statute that gives neither the ore side nor the stone side anything extra.
Tenn. Code Ann. § 55-7-203 sets 80,000 lb gross, 20,000 lb on a single axle and 34,000 lb on a tandem, with up to 550 lb more for emissions-reduction equipment. Subsection (b)(7) grants a ten per cent margin of error on the weighing to logging, sand, coal, clay, shale, phosphate, solid waste, recovered materials, farm trucks and machinery trucks — off the interstate system only. Crushed stone is absent, and so are limestone, aggregate and gravel.
Tenn. Code § 47-26-812 adds an axle-citation shield and five hundred pounds for a natural resources load, from a weights-and-measures chapter about certified public weighers rather than the motor vehicle code. Off the interstate again.
And § 55-7-104 is the one that costs a working day: an overweight vehicle may not be moved until the load is reduced into compliance or a permit obtained, and failing to comply is itself a Class C misdemeanour.
Tenn. Code Ann. § 55-7-203 and § 55-7-104, and Tenn. Code § 47-26-812, as summarised by the University of Tennessee County Technical Assistance Service. Information, not legal advice.
Tennessee paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork is one sentence.
Everything after that sentence is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither one stops a sale.
The salvage rule is the one people repeat wrongly. Tennessee’s salvage and rebuilt part is built on the term passenger motor vehicle, and § 55-3-201 defines that as a vehicle ten model years old or less which, if it is a light-duty truck or a multipurpose vehicle, is rated at not more than nine thousand pounds gross.
So the seventy-five per cent threshold does not reach a truck rated above nine thousand pounds at any age, and does not reach a vehicle of any kind over ten model years old. Those limbs describe the class the part governs rather than exceptions inside it. Whether some other provision reaches such a vehicle was not determined and is not claimed here.
Tenn. Code Ann. § 55-3-201 and § 55-3-211, with the Tennessee Department of Revenue’s guidance. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the day those were read.
What we buy here
All of that iron is iron we buy. Ore haulers and heavy tandem dumps off the underground workings. Plant trucks and loader support off the Rogers Group facility, which is yard work rather than pit work.
Day cabs, road tractors, box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, work trucks and pickups too — not a Smith County thing in particular, they run everywhere.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.
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 Gordonsville
- 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. Lost titles have a counter replacement, and where none exists there is a bonded route.
- It hauled ore, so the body has taken a beating.Expected on a Crucible MTN machine and not a mark against it. Dense material and full loads every cycle. Tell us about the frame and the hoist.
- Plant or pit?Say which, because the Rogers Group row in Smith County is coded a plant. No pit haul means no haul-road impact and no tyre cuts — road miles and yard hours instead.
- How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.
Why people call
Beyond a machine that has simply done its cycles, the reasons here are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract hauler losing a run to the mine and having one truck too many the following week.
The yards between the Rogers Group plant and the mine road usually have one standing that has not moved since the last contract, and Smith County is small enough that most of them are known about.
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.