Hood County
Dimension limestone, twelve people, and a load that has to arrive whole
The pit here is the Smith Pit, twelve people on the federal mine roll, carried as a surface operation working dimension limestone under the operator Scott Stone Supply, in Hood County. A sand and gravel row sits alongside it under the town’s own name.
Dimension stone is a different trade from crushed stone and the difference matters to a truck. Crushed rock is a bulk commodity and a load of it is worth what it weighs; dimension limestone is cut block and slab, and a load is worth what arrives intact.
Twelve people is a real crew for that work, because cutting, handling and loading block is slow and skilled compared with running a crusher. The equipment reflects it.
So the trucks are flatbeds and lowboys, and the deck tells the story
That product dictates the fleet. Block and slab travel chained and strapped on flatbeds and lowboys rather than tipped out of a body, so this is not dump-truck country in the way most of the stone entries in this lane are.
The wear lands somewhere different too. A deck that has carried stone shows crush and gouging where the load sat, the chains and binders take real abuse, and the suspension carries dense concentrated weight rather than a spread load. None of that appears on an odometer, and a Hood County flatbed off the Scott Stone Supply work should be judged on its deck first.
The destination is where this page stops. The metroplex is 60 to 80 miles up the road, which is genuine highway distance rather than a fringe run, but the sand rows in this north Texas group have no established destination at all and no wellsite story is written about them here.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Those loads run under one statutory ceiling, and stone 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 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. 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 carries 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 the 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 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 rather than pure arithmetic: there must also be damage to, or a missing, major component part.
The calculation also 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. Flatbeds and lowboys off the Smith Pit block work. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers, day cabs and road tractors, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Hood County sits inside a straightforward run of the metroplex, so a seller here is at the edge of one of the deepest markets in the state rather than outside it.
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 Tolar
- 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 gouged and the frame is fine.That is exactly what block work does, and around the Smith Pit it is expected rather than held against the truck. Tell us what it carried.
- It hauled sand as well as stone.Common in Hood County and not a problem. The two wear a truck differently, so tell us the mix and we’ll ask the right questions.
- 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.
Why people call
Beyond a stone contract ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for one job that outlived the job.
Yards around the Smith Pit and out across Hood 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.