Permian Basin
Three small pits in the service capital of the basin
For a city this well known, the extraction record here is modest: three crushed-stone rows recording 5, 4 and 2 employees. One is Nobles Aggregate; one is named for the farm-to-market road it sits on; the third is simply a portable plant.
The portable row has no active state registration within a mile and its nearest is 4.6 miles off, which for a plant that moves is the expected shape rather than a discrepancy.
The road-numbered row has a near-twin: a similarly named pit attached to Monahans about forty miles away. Two pits named for the same road number, forty miles apart, is the kind of thing that makes a records search harder than it looks.
So the aggregate here is a service to drilling, not an industry beside it
Those three small pits are not what this city is for. It is the service centre of the basin, and the caliche and base they produce goes onto lease roads and well pads rather than into construction.
It makes for short off-highway hauls over rough ground, which is hard on suspensions and tyres and gentle on the odometer. A truck can be thoroughly used up here at a mileage that looks like nothing.
Around it runs the far larger oilfield service fleet: vacuum trucks, winch trucks, water haulers and the crew vehicles that go with a pad. Nobles Aggregate ground and the portable row 4.6 miles from its nearest registration both feed the same lease roads.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
On the highway stretches all of it 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 base haulers off the Nobles Aggregate ground and the portable plant. Vacuum trucks, winch trucks and water haulers off the pad work. Day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Basin equipment tends to come free when a programme moves rather than when a truck wears out, so there is often plenty left in it. The Nobles Aggregate end and the road-numbered pit 40 miles from its near-twin both turn trucks over that way.
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 Midland
- 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 spent its life on lease roads.That is the normal shape here. Low miles and a hard life — tell us the hours and what has been replaced.
- The suspension has taken a beating.Expected off basin lease roads and not a disqualifier. Nobles Aggregate work and the portable row 4.6 miles out do the same.
- 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.
- How far out do you come?All of Midland County and out across the basin, and plenty of it we buy remotely and arrange the tow.
Why people call
Beyond a drilling programme moving on, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for a pad that is finished.
Yards around the Nobles Aggregate ground and out toward the road-numbered pit 40 miles off 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.