Howard County
A quarry row run by an oilfield services company
Two crushed-stone operations attach here, and the operator of the smaller one is the interesting part. Silver Spur Energy Services is an oilfield services company rather than an aggregates business, and it holds a pit with 2 employees.
That is a different kind of ownership from a merchant quarry. A services company digging its own material is supplying its own pads and lease roads rather than selling to a market.
The other row, the Tubb Quarry plant, records 5 employees. Neither has an active registration within a mile — nearest 5.6 miles and 5.3 miles respectively — and there is one rail yard 1.27 miles from the centre of town.
So the aggregate here serves drilling rather than construction
That ownership pattern changes where the loads go. Caliche and base out of a services-company pit go onto lease roads and well pads, not into a concrete plant.
It is short-haul, off-highway work for a lot of the day, which is hard on suspensions and tyres and easy on the odometer. A truck can be genuinely worn out here with a mileage that looks like nothing.
Alongside it runs the ordinary oilfield service fleet: vacuum trucks, winch trucks and the crew vehicles that go with a pad. All of it works the same lease roads across Howard County, and the Tubb Quarry plant loads onto them too.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
On the highway stretches all of it runs under one statutory ceiling.
Texas sets gross weight at 80,000 lb, a single axle at 20,000 lb and a tandem at 34,000 lb — the plain federal figures, with no commodity variance of the kind Georgia and Kentucky grant.
What Texas grants instead is permits, and each one is written for a named industry: ready-mixed concrete, fluid milk, timber, and super heavy single-trip. There is no permit named for aggregate, stone, sand or quarry products. So a stone hauler here gets the general permit and nothing else, while a ready-mix truck sits on the list — two trades a reader might treat as one, on opposite sides of the line.
The general permit adds ten per cent on the axle and five per cent on gross, and it comes with a bond and liability for actual damage to load-restricted roads. On a load-zoned road the permitted weight is ten per cent less than the maximum, so those two percentages run in opposite directions and must never be added together.
Tex. Transp. Code § 621.101; Chapter 623 permits. Information, not legal advice.
Texas paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork comes down to 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. Both are ordinary and neither stops a sale.
One Texas rule is worth knowing because it runs further than any other state on file. Texas brands a truck salvage only where the cost of repairs exceeds the actual cash value before the damage — effectively one hundred per cent, against eighty in Florida and sixty in Oklahoma. And it is a two-part test, not pure arithmetic: there must also be damage to, or a missing, major component part.
The statute lists thirteen major component parts, and the calculation leaves out repainting and sales tax, which no other state on file excludes. For a truck whose damage is mostly cosmetic that moves the answer a long way.
Tex. Transp. Code § 501.091. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule file was last verified.
What we buy here
All of that iron is iron we buy. Dump trucks and base haulers off the Tubb Quarry and the Silver Spur Energy Services pit. Vacuum trucks and winch trucks off the pad work. Day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Howard County equipment tends to come free when a drilling programme moves rather than when a truck wears out, so there is often life left in it.
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 Big Spring
- 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.
- It spent its life on lease roads, not highways.That is the normal shape of a Silver Spur Energy Services truck. Low miles, hard life — tell us the hours and we will take it from there.
- The suspension has had a beating.Expected off Howard County lease roads and not a disqualifier. Tell us what has been replaced.
- What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route.
- Do you have to come out to look at it?Not necessarily. We can come to you and drive it away, come and tow it, buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you can drive it to us. Whichever suits the truck and your week.
Why people call
Beyond a drilling programme moving on, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for a pad that is finished.
Yards around the Tubb Quarry and across Howard County usually have one waiting, and the yard 1.27 miles from the middle of town sees its share.
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.