Hill County
A cement company’s quarry, and a pit sitting on its own registration
Two operations sit here. The larger records 9 employees and is held by a cement group — a quarry typed for dimension limestone rather than a plant, which is ordinary enough: a cement company holding a limestone quarry is exactly what you would expect.
The second is Canfield Materials with 3 employees, and its registration is unusually precise. An active state aggregate registration under the Rattler Rock name sits 0.00 miles from the node, working limestone. Nought point nought nought is the register agreeing exactly with the coordinate, which is rarer than it sounds on this lane.
Both sit in or beside the Barnett Shale, which spans roughly five thousand square miles across twenty-five counties under the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex.
So these are highway distances, not metro-fringe ones
That shale group sits 60 to 80 miles from Dallas–Fort Worth, and the distance is what decides the equipment.
Sixty-odd miles is a genuine highway leg rather than a run across town. A truck loaded at Canfield Materials or the cement quarry spends an hour at road speed each way, so the mileage is honest and the driveline does the work.
It also means a Hill County truck is usually a highway truck that happens to haul stone, which is a kinder life than a pit shuttle and generally shows in the driveline.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Those loaded highway legs run under one statutory ceiling, and stone is not on the relief list.
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 aggregate haulers off the Canfield Materials ground and the cement quarry. Flatbeds off the dimension-limestone side. Day cabs and road tractors for the metro run, lowboys, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Two small operations inside Hill County turn over a truck at a time rather than a fleet at a time, which suits how we buy anyway.
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 Blum
- 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 mileage is high for a quarry truck.Expected at 60 to 80 miles from the metro. Canfield Materials loads are highway loads, not pit shuttles.
- The box is beaten up but the driveline is good.Common across Hill County and not a problem. Tell us about both.
- 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 quarry contract ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for one run that outlived it.
Yards around the Canfield Materials pit and across Hill County usually have one waiting.
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.