We buy trucks in Double Horn

One extraction row attaches here, and its headcount is the most informative thing on it. The Highway 71 Quarry is carried as crushed and broken limestone, operator of record Spicewood Crushed Stone LLC, with three employees reported to MSHA, and it resolves inside the place radius at 0.76 miles.

Three people on a state highway, with no entry identified in the TxDOT rated-source catalogue, is consistent with a merchant pit — selling base, fill and driveway stone to whoever turns up with a truck — rather than a rated supplier feeding state road work. That is what the records are consistent with. It is not established, and the research behind this page recorded it in exactly those terms.

The distinction carries further than it sounds. A rated source ships to a specification and a schedule; a merchant pit sells by the load to builders, ranchers and contractors, and the customer arrives in his own truck. So the equipment around an operation like this belongs to the buyers rather than to the quarry.

That last point is the one that decides who we end up talking to around here.

Burnet County carries thirteen rows in total — ten crushed stone, two dimension stone and one sand and gravel — so this is quarry country by any measure, but a three-person pit does not run a fleet, and Spicewood Crushed Stone is working 0.76 miles from the middle of a very small place. The tandem dump that pulls in for a load of base is somebody’s own truck, working a radius of a few dozen miles, and it is the kind of truck that gets sold one at a time.

Those trucks wear in a particular way. Short hauls on ranch roads and county roads mean a lot of loading cycles, a lot of low-gear work and comparatively little highway, so the hour meter runs ahead of the odometer and the body, hoist and tailgate age faster than the driveline. When you describe one to us we will ask what it hauled and how far, not what the dash says.

Those small operations are not small in the eyes of the register, and that is a fact worth carrying.

Under 30 Texas Administrative Code chapter 342 the operator of every quarry or pit in this state must register each extraction location with the TCEQ ten business days before extraction begins, and renew it annually. There is no small-operator exemption in that requirement; a three-person face owes the same registration as a large plant.

Weight runs the same way. Texas sets gross at 80,000 lb, a single axle at 20,000 lb and a tandem at 34,000 lb, with no commodity variance of the kind Georgia and Kentucky grant, and its permit list is written by named industry: ready-mixed concrete, fluid milk, timber, and super heavy single-trip. Aggregate, stone, sand and quarry products are on none of them, so a stone hauler takes the general Chapter 623 route — ten per cent on the axle, five per cent on gross, a fifteen thousand dollar 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 against each other and must never be added together.

30 Tex. Admin. Code ch. 342; Tex. Transp. Code § 621.101; Chapter 623 permits. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond those rules, the paperwork is a single 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 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. It is a two-part test rather than pure arithmetic: there must also be damage to, or a missing, major component part.

The calculation leaves out repainting and sales tax, which no other state on file excludes. On a pit truck, where the paint goes first, that exclusion moves the answer a long way.

Emissions inspection does not reach you. Diesel vehicles are not required to be emissions-inspected in Texas, and this county is not on the programme list either.

Tex. Transp. Code § 501.091. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule file was last verified.

Those rules land the same way on every body style, and so does the offer.

Tandem and tri-axle dump trucks off the base and fill runs. Flatbeds and stake beds, end dumps, day cabs and road tractors, rollbacks, water trucks, box trucks, service bodies, and the crew pickups behind them.

We buy all of them. Double Horn is small and a long way from a dealer, so buying it remotely and arranging the tow is a normal path here rather than a last resort; coming to you and driving it away or towing it are both open, and you are welcome to drive it to us. The Highway 71 Quarry under Spicewood Crushed Stone is the one extraction row on file at this place, out of thirteen across Burnet County.

• 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.
• I am one truck, not a company.That is most of what we buy out here. A three-person pit like Spicewood Crushed Stone does not run a fleet, and neither do the people hauling out of it, so a single tandem dump is an ordinary call rather than an awkward one.
• Do you come out this far?We do. We can also buy it remotely and arrange the tow, which for a place this size is often simpler for everybody, and driving it to us stays open.
• The odometer is low for its age.Expected. A truck working a few dozen miles out of a pit collects loading cycles rather than miles, so we read the hour meter, the hoist and the body before the dash.
• Do I need an emissions test to sell it?No. Diesel vehicles are exempt from Texas emissions inspection, and Burnet County is not on the programme list either way.
• 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.

Those are the mechanics. The reasons behind a call are more personal than that.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A job that finished, or a contractor who has grown out of one truck and into another and needs the first one gone. At the scale Spicewood Crushed Stone works at, 0.76 miles from the centre of town with three people on the books, equipment changes hands because a person’s circumstances changed, not because a replacement cycle came round.

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, in Double Horn and across Burnet County.