When it comes to catching overweight trucks, Phillips, 44, is the Top Gun in the state Highway Patrol. Last year he cited 245 trucks for hauling 3.1 million pounds too much, which added up to $104,712 in fines.

Still, he's not impressed with himself.

"A lot of it is being at the right place at the right time," Phillips says. He has been doing this for more than 10 years, splitting time between the weigh station at Lumberton and roaming the roads. Before that, he was a deputy sheriff in Robeson County for 14 years.

There haven't been enough officers who do what Phillips does, patrol officials concede. More than 100 of their 263 weight enforcement jobs were vacant until last month, when the patrol started filling some weigh-station jobs with civilians.

Phillips has stopped some drivers so many times they get to know each other.

"You sort of form a bond with some of the drivers. I mean, you get friendly," he said. "Now, you have problems with a few, but it's very few. Most of them know you've got a job to do and they've got one, too."

When the wood-chip truck stops, Phillips greets the driver, Troy Lee Williams of Rose Hill. Phillips can see through the ventilation holes at the top of the trailer that it's loaded to the top. He and Andy Nance, another weight enforcement officer who has stopped to help, go to work, one on each side of the truck. Each officer shoves a 42-pound scale, about the size and thickness of a medium pizza box, ahead of the front wheels, and Phillips signals the driver.

Williams, 36, eases his 1994 Peterbilt tractor forward onto the scales.

Using hand signals and shouting to be heard above the engine noise, Phillips tells Williams when to go and when to stop, and the weighing continues. The scales display the weight much like bathroom scales do, only the maximum isn't 250 or 300 pounds. This one tops out at 20,000.

Two days before, another weight officer cited Williams for being overweight. Before that, he said, he had not been weighed for eight or 10 months.

He is not worried about what Phillips and Nance will find -- he said that's the logging company's problem. He said he told Phillips, "Look, buddy, you've got a job to do just like I do. Have at it."

Williams is hauling for Duplin Forest Products, from Tar Heel to the International Paper plant at Riegelwood. He is paid not by how much he hauls but by how far he hauls it, at the rate of $2.42 a mile. It's in the logging company's interest to load the truck as heavy as it legally can. Williams said the logger pays the fine.

"Anything concerning the truck is mine," he says. "And anything concerning the trailer and the load is on the logger."

In a few minutes, the officers finish, and Phillips says the truck weighs 85,200 pounds, which exceeds a break granted by the legislature. The drive axles have too much weight on them, too. The total fine is $187, half of what it would have been before 1997, when the legislature cut the fines in half for trucks loaded with wood chips.

Phillips says drivers will sometimes try to move an overweight load during lunchtime, when they figure weight officers will be sitting in a restaurant. So sometimes he eats early, or late, and stays on the road. He likes catching overweight trucks so much that, if he's having a good day, sometimes he works off the clock.

"If ... I know they're running, I'm gonna stay out there," he says. "I've done that a many a time, yes sir. I want at least two a day."

Sometimes, he says, he's lucky to get one, and sometimes he strikes out. But he says that's rare.

"It's a cat-and-mouse game out here," Phillips says. "We catch a few, and a lot get away."

(Database editor David Raynor contributed to this report.)