Blanco County
Two quarries, and no interstate for either of them
Two crushed-stone operations work here: West Henly Materials with 13 employees and a Crushed Stone operation with 11. One is rated for highway work, carried in the state catalogue under Armadillo Materials with a surface aggregate classification behind it.
The fact that shapes both of them is an absence. Blanco County has no interstate at all.
For most of the country that would be a routing inconvenience. Here it is a legal one, and it is worth explaining why.
So the relief other states give off the interstate does not exist here
That absence matters because of how other states write their aggregate rules. Georgia grants extra tandem weight for construction aggregate specifically when a truck stays off the interstate; Kentucky grants a tolerance on listed bulk commodities the same way.
Texas does neither. Its permit list is written by named industry — ready-mixed concrete, fluid milk, timber, super heavy single-trip — and stone appears on none of them. There is no off-interstate allowance to fall back on, so having no interstate changes the route without changing the weight.
A West Henly Materials truck therefore runs at the ordinary ceiling on state and county roads across Blanco County, which are slower, tighter and harder on a driveline than a divided highway.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
That ceiling is the same one every truck in the state runs under.
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 Armadillo Materials rated ground and the West Henly Materials pit. Day cabs and road tractors for the runs toward Austin, flatbeds, lowboys, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Two operations of this size across Blanco County turn over equipment steadily rather than all at once.
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 Johnson City
- 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 never ran interstate miles.Expected in Blanco County, which has none. State and county road miles are harder work, and we take that into account.
- The box is beaten up but the driveline is good.Common on West Henly Materials and Armadillo Materials work. 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 West Henly Materials pit and across Blanco 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.