Guadalupe County
Frac sand, mined close to the well on purpose
The operation here is a sand pit — two employees, operator of record Brauntex Materials, carried by MSHA under the commodity string for industrial sand. That string is the giveaway. This is Eagle Ford in-basin frac sand.
In-basin is the whole point of it. Proppant used to come from Wisconsin and Minnesota by rail across half the country; the industry moved the mines next to the wells instead. Sand out of Guadalupe County goes into Eagle Ford completions a short truck run away, and it never sees a railcar.
That puts a specific fleet on these roads rather than a general one, and it is a small operation feeding a large district.
So sand moves three different ways, and each wears a truck differently
Because the mine is close to the well, the truck does the whole job, and there are three ways to do it. Sealed sand boxes ride on a standard flatbed and get forklift-swapped in ten to fifteen minutes. Pneumatic tankers blow the load into wellsite silos. Belly dumps drop it.
The thing they share is the waiting. Wellsite queuing puts hours on an engine that the odometer never sees, and that is a property of proppant delivery rather than of any one basin.
It is worth saying plainly: a pneumatic tanker that carried sand has had a different life from one that carried cement, because proppant is chosen for hardness. You know better than we do what that does to a tank over a few years. Brauntex Materials is two employees feeding an Eagle Ford district many times its size.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Those loads run under one statutory ceiling, and sand is conspicuously absent from the relief.
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 and the permit, the paperwork is 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 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 equipment is equipment we buy. Pneumatic tankers and belly dumps off the sand work. Flatbeds that ran boxes. Day cabs and road tractors, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
San Antonio sits thirty to forty miles from the core of this district, which gives a seller here something a Permian seller does not have: a deep general truck market that does not rise and fall with drilling alone.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. San Antonio sits 30 miles off, which is the nearest deep market for a used truck.
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 Seguin
- 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.
- My tanker hauled sand, not cement. Does that matter?It matters to us in the sense that we’d like to know, because proppant and cement leave a tank in different shape. It does not change whether we buy it.
- The hours are high and the miles are low.That is the normal shape of a wellsite truck and it is not a problem. Tell us the hours.
- 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 Guadalupe County and down into the Eagle Ford counties. Distance has never stopped a sale.
Why people call
Beyond a completion schedule that went quiet, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for one contract that outlived the contract.
Yards around Brauntex and down toward the Eagle Ford counties 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. Down in the Eagle Ford counties the same tankers come up for sale for the same reasons. Brauntex Materials and the Eagle Ford counties south of it turn equipment over steadily.