Just a mini rant! Looking for a new truck.

Yep, the Highway use tax has to be paid before you can get a tag. IRS website gives you all the details.

The reason they use the smaller engines in the class 7 is they are lower gross weight. Most class 7 trucks are pick up and delivery, mostly in state or small regional, not considered over the road. Most are seldom loaded to full legal gross weight, that truck should be legal up to 60,000 lbs I think, as long as the axle spacing is enough for the bridge law that is enforced by some states. A good Rand Mcnally trucker's road atlas has a chart on the axle spacing to haul X amount of weight. We used to haul 80,000 gross weight with class 8 semi's with 300 hp engines. They did the job, but when you hit a hill, you went to grabbing gears, and hoped you had enough! I guess I'm spoiled, I won't buy anything with less than 450hp now.

I'm spoiled with horse power too, or atleast I was when I was using my gold truck. It has over 500 hp and would fly up the mountains. My white one that I'm using now is around 300 and seams like a turtle in comparison.


The gvw on this truck is 53,800 witch is higher then most all the others ones that I've looked at.

Well everything is starting to come together. Financing wasn't a problem and my bro n law and I are heading to inspect the truck this evening. Dispatch got me another load going near the truck so we should be able to inspect it Friday and hopefully head home with it.

Good luck Eric!

Hope it's the one!!

Thanks guy.


I did a little more research on the highway use tax. If I understand this correct I shouldn't have to pay it due to my gvw being under 55k.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i2290.pdf

I asked the current owner of the truck and he said he was never required to pay anything like it.

Well we did a very lengthy inspection on the truck this evening. The only things that we found was the power steering leak that we knew about and a oil leak at the back of the oil pressure gauge. I drove it about 50 miles and it drove out good other then the front tires needing rebalanced.

We agreed on a price and we are just waiting in the finance company. I should be able to pick it up next week.

Now you can go make some money

Good deal on the road use tax, I knew there was a cutoff, but wasn't sure of the weight. That's why I gave the link so you could figure it out.
Sounds like things are working out for you. I hope your finance company doesn't do like the one I was dealing with, want an outrageous down payment. That knocked me out of a couple of good trucks I would have liked to have bought, I just wasn't able to come up with that much of a down payment at the time, my other truck had already drained my savings. Looking back, I should have gotten rid of it [the other truck] a lot sooner than I did, but hindsight is always 20/20.

One question, where will you sleep since it doesn't have a sleeper? Motels? I figure you'll have to run a logbook too, right? Just curious, I'm not familiar with laws on anything but class 8 trucks.
Also, how did you ever come out on your gold truck? Did the insurance co ever pay off? You may have said and I missed it somehow.

Bamamav said:

Good deal on the road use tax, I knew there was a cutoff, but wasn't sure of the weight. That's why I gave the link so you could figure it out.
Sounds like things are working out for you. I hope your finance company doesn't do like the one I was dealing with, want an outrageous down payment. That knocked me out of a couple of good trucks I would have liked to have bought, I just wasn't able to come up with that much of a down payment at the time, my other truck had already drained my savings. Looking back, I should have gotten rid of it [the other truck] a lot sooner than I did, but hindsight is always 20/20.

One question, where will you sleep since it doesn't have a sleeper? Motels? I figure you'll have to run a logbook too, right? Just curious, I'm not familiar with laws on anything but class 8 trucks.
Also, how did you ever come out on your gold truck? Did the insurance co ever pay off? You may have said and I missed it somehow.

Click to expand...

I have near perfect credit so all they require is the first payment. It's with the same company I suggested for you.

The dedicated run that I hope to run most of the time will allow me to get home most nights. But other nights I'll be in a hotel.

I run a log book in my pick up now and will continue to in this truck. In my pick up I don't have to run a log book when empty because my gvw is below 10k.

I got screwed by Allstate on my gold truck. I got nothing but a burnt truck.

How's your new rig treating ya?

So far so good. I had to put a new starter on 3 weeks ago, it just suddenly died. The lift fuel pump went out on the APU, I bought a universal style pump, but found out when I went to put it on the lines are odd sized and it won't work, so I guess I'll have to go to Thermo King and get a factory pump, probably overpriced.

The truck pulls better than anything I've had in a long time, it walks up hills in high gear my previous truck had to drop two gears on. And that's grossed out at 80,000 lbs. Fuel mileage is a little worse than I had hoped for, but the pulling power makes up for it to me. I have a little front end issue, it pulls to the right and have a little shimmy in the front tires, probably because they are mismatched brands. I always replace steering tires in pairs, they put a new cheap tire on before I bought it when they supposedly aligned it. I'm going to take it to a Petro when I get a little $ ahead and get a three axle alignment and will probably get a set of Centramatic wheel balancers put on. Just have to put up with it for a while until I get caught back up.

That sux on the pickup. Could you find the parts you need and redo it yourself? Since it still runs, probably wouldn't be to hard to fix.

Dedicated run is the best way! I haul for one company 95% of the time, 275 mile radius of home. I'm home every day, could sleep at home, but prefer to sleep in the truck at the customers so I can unload early. No more OTR for me if I can help it, staying out 5-6 days a week or more at a time is for single guys without a life at home.

Glad ya like it. Some small issues can be expected on used trucks. I'm sure I'll have a few myself.

I would start with the matching tires. Just because the tires are the same size doesn't mean they measure the same. I bet ones taller.

I bought a identical truck to my gold one and have used it for parts. I plan on using the drivetrain in a Coe eventually. I really miss the horsepower it has, that's for sure.

A few pics

Man, 21... that things gonna' haul...... [cl[cl[cl

Hummm, with a winch you could haul one travel trailer on the truck and pull one behind. Double money!

Bamamav said:

Hummm, with a winch you could haul one travel trailer on the truck and pull one behind. Double money!

Click to expand...

I can make more money hauling cars and a travel trailer behind it but if I don't have any cars to haul I would load up two trailers in a heartbeat.

Well I thought this would be a done deal already. The first place that I was pre approved with kept giving me the run around and screwed stuff up so I went to another place hoping to speed things up and now they are doing the same crap. I'm afraid the guy who owns the truck is going to loose his patience and realist it.

Dang, that sounds like the way I was treated. I went through several different lenders [and three different trucks] before I got a deal I could live with. Hope they do you right this time.

The first place asked all kinds of crazy questions that I felt shouldn't of mattered. They wanted to know if I was running long haul, who I was hauling for, why I needed a truck like this, what kind of plates I was running, why I was doing this and excavation, and a bunch of other stuff. And they would take a day to reply to each email. But they said I was pre approved for $35k on any truck that was worth it and it would only take three days to finish up the deal. That was over a week ago.

Un huh. That 2 or 3 days deal is a lie. Every lender I dealt with promised that and none delivered. I went through the same thing with emails and phone calls, send this or that and we'll let you know tomorrow, yeah right. They all promised the moon then something wouldn't meet their standards. One even told me that since I ran out of state they couldn't do it. Wtf? They sent me the credit app, I didn't ask them for it. The whole process pizzed me off. Took way too long and like you said, too many stupid questions that were none of their business.