Comal County
Two cement plants in one county, again
Two integrated cement plants work here. The Hunter Cement Plant is the larger at 133 employees, and the Balcones Plant runs 85 alongside an aggregates quarry of its own.
The Hunter plant is stated at 2.1 million tons of capacity with more than 140 years of limestone reserves behind it. No throughput figure was found for Balcones and none is stated here.
Ownership changed recently on one of them. Ash Grove Cement, a company in the Irish building-materials group, closed its purchase of the Hunter plant and four terminals from Martin Marietta on the ninth of February, 2024.
Those plants put two different trucks on the same roads
Both operations ship cement, and cement leaves a plant in two quite separate ways.
Bulk cement goes out in pneumatic tankers to concrete plants. Ready-mixed concrete goes out in mixers to a pour. They are different trucks with different lives, and only one of them gets any weight relief: the state ready-mixed concrete permit covers the mixer delivering the mix, not the bulk tanker leaving the Hunter Cement Plant gate.
That distinction catches people out, because it looks like one industry from outside and is two from inside. The Balcones Plant ships both ways out of one gate.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Those loads run under one statutory ceiling, and only one of the two truck types is named on the permit list.
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. Mixers off the ready-mix side. Pneumatic and bulk tankers off the Balcones Plant and Hunter Cement Plant gates. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the quarries, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
A plant with 140 years of reserves behind it is not a short-term proposition, so the fleets here turn over on a schedule rather than in a crisis.
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 New Braunfels
- 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 drum is worn out on my mixer.A worn drum is not a missing component and does not make a truck incomplete. Tell us about it.
- My tanker carried cement, not sand.Good to know either way. Balcones Plant and Hunter Cement Plant tankers are ordinary here and we buy them.
- 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 plant fleet turning over, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for a pour schedule that no longer exists.
Yards around the Balcones Plant and out across Comal County usually have one waiting, and the 2.1 million tons moving through Hunter keeps a lot of equipment busy.
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.