Gillespie County
A machine-named row sitting on a 69-acre registration
Two operations attach here. One is a portable crusher with 4 employees; the other is El Oso, also 4, working dimension stone under Ramirez Stone and Masonry.
The crusher row is the instructive one. It is machine-named, which usually suggests something transient, and yet an active state registration for the Fuhrmann Mine sits 0.18 miles away covering 69 acres of limestone.
That combination — a machine name on a substantial permitted site — is the third such case found in four research batches. A machine-shaped name is not evidence of a small operation, and this lane has now seen that three times.
So the stone side here works the way the whole Hill Country does
That El Oso row belongs to a trade that runs across several counties on the same pattern.
Hill Country building stone is one industry with San Saba and the Williamson belt, and it moves finished rather than raw: cut, palletised and strapped to a flatbed deck, forklifted on at the quarry and off at the yard.
The wear lands on the deck and the securing gear rather than on a hoist, so a Gillespie County flatbed reads as tired in the boards while the driveline underneath may have done comparatively little.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Crushed or cut, 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. Flatbeds and step decks off the El Oso and Ramirez Stone work. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the 69 acres of the Fuhrmann Mine registration. Day cabs and road tractors, lowboys, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Two four-person operations sell equipment one truck 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 Fredericksburg
- 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 deck is chewed up from stone loads.Decking is a repair, not a disqualifier. El Oso and Ramirez Stone flatbeds all end up that way.
- It followed a portable crusher.Then it has highway miles as well as pit hours. The Fuhrmann Mine ground runs both and we would like to hear 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 Fuhrmann Mine registration and across Gillespie 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.