Hill country stone
Three operations, and one of them runs backwards
Three crushed-stone rows sit here. The Honey Creek Quarry is the largest at 12 employees, and the state highway department carries it in the rated-source catalogue under Knife River with a surface aggregate classification behind it. A second plant records 8 and is rated under Hanson Aggregates.
The third is only 3 people and is the one worth pausing on. It is recorded as a screening plant, which processes material produced somewhere else.
That single word changes the traffic. A quarry sends loads out. A screening plant takes them in as well.
So this is one of the few places that generates inbound stone traffic
Those inbound loads are unusual. Almost everywhere else on this lane, aggregate moves one way: out of the ground and away.
Here a truck can be loaded at a pit, tipped at the screening plant, and reloaded with finished product for somewhere else. Two loaded legs in a cycle rather than one loaded and one empty.
It is harder work per mile than it looks. A truck that is rarely running empty spends its whole day at working weight, and brakes, springs and rear ends wear accordingly. Honey Creek Quarry loads and Knife River rated stone both come through it.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Loaded in both directions or not, it all 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 aggregate haulers off the Honey Creek Quarry and the Knife River rated ground. Day cabs and road tractors for the longer legs. Flatbeds, lowboys, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Hanson Aggregates ground and the screening operation turn over different kinds of equipment, and both come free from time to time.
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 Burnet
- 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 ran loaded both ways most days.That is the shape of screening-plant work and it is hard on a truck. Tell us what has been replaced and we will take it from there.
- The box is beaten up but the driveline is good.Normal on Honey Creek Quarry and Knife River equipment. 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 job that outlived it.
Yards around the Honey Creek Quarry and the Hanson Aggregates plant 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.