Yavapai County
A cement plant and two stone quarries in one small place
Three rows are filed here and they add up to more industry than the size of the place suggests. Drake Cement, under Drake Cement LLC, works cement and reports 111 employees. Rock Ridge Quarries works dimension stone with 41, its coordinate 8.58 miles out. A sandstone quarry under Drake Stone Products reports 15, at 9.18 miles.
Put beside the rest of the state that is a concentration. Yavapai County carries 337 of this state’s 631 recorded employees in this survey across three rows — the cement plant at Clarkdale with 185, Drake Cement here with 111, and Rock Ridge Quarries here with 41. Two cement plants and a dimension-stone quarry in one county, and two of the three at the same place name.
One thing this page will not tell you is who owns Drake Cement. The parent company is understood but was explicitly not verified when the rule file was compiled, and a foreign-parent claim on a page needs a source rather than a recollection.
So every load out of here goes downhill for a long way
Those 111 employees make product that has to reach a market, and the market is not close.
This state has two markets and no third. Paulden sits on high ground and the Phoenix side is a long way south and a long way lower — roughly three thousand feet of descent over the run, read from general geography rather than measured, so treat it as shape and not as a figure. The shape is what matters: a loaded truck out of Drake Cement spends most of its outbound trip on a sustained downgrade and comes back empty up the same hill.
That is brake work, and it is the single most useful thing to know about a truck from this part of Yavapai County. Retarders, engine brakes, drums or discs, wheel bearings and the cooling system all take a beating a flat-country truck never gives them, and the odometer says nothing about any of it. Tell us how it was driven on the descent; you will know and we will not.
Arizona weight law
One axle number, and the tolerance is already inside it
Loaded or empty, it runs under a state figure written differently from most.
Arizona sets the single axle at 20,000 lb under A.R.S. § 28-1100, and the enforcement tolerance is included in that number rather than added on top of it. Alabama is the only other state on file that builds it in the same way — Georgia, Kentucky and Florida all publish a base and then allow something over it. So a driver who has worked one of those states and moved here can arrive expecting headroom this section does not give.
The gross limit is a different matter. It was not extracted from the section text when the rule file was compiled, so this page does not state one. An unverified ceiling is worse than no ceiling, and the section itself is where the answer is.
A.R.S. § 28-1100. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule file was last verified.
Arizona paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork is one sentence and then a set of fixes.
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.
Arizona has no percentage threshold for salvage. A.R.S. § 28-2091 brands a vehicle salvage where it has been stolen, wrecked, destroyed, flood or water damaged, or otherwise damaged to the point that the owner, the leasing company, the lender or the insurer considers it uneconomical to repair. That is a judgement rather than an arithmetic test, and the wording sits closest to California’s. Four of the seven states on file work this way; Kentucky and Alabama use 75 per cent and Florida 80.
There is also a separate nonrepairable class, and A.R.S. § 28-2095 covers the restored salvage certificate — its inspection triggers were not extracted, so this page does not describe them.
A.R.S. § 28-2091, § 28-2095. Information, not legal advice.
What we buy here
Those rules land the same way on every body style, and so does the offer. We buy all of them.
Mixers and bulk cement tankers off the plant, tandem and tri-axle dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the quarries, flatbeds and stake beds carrying dimension stone, day cabs and road tractors, water trucks, service bodies, box trucks, rollbacks, and the crew pickups. Box trucks and straight trucks are not a Yavapai County thing in particular — they are everywhere — and we buy those too.
All the usual ways work: we come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you drive it to us. Between Drake Cement at 111, Rock Ridge Quarries at 41 and the sandstone quarry at 15, this is a working place rather than an empty one — but 167 people is still not a market that quietly absorbs a 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 Paulden
- 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.
- What is actually here?Three rows: Drake Cement at 111 employees, Rock Ridge Quarries at 41 and 8.58 miles out, and a sandstone quarry at 15 and 9.18 miles out.
- My brakes have had a hard life.They will have. The haul to the main market is a long sustained descent, so we go through the retarder, the drums or discs, the bearings and the cooling system before anything else, and we expect what we find.
- Is this a big mining county?By this survey’s count, yes: Yavapai County carries 337 of the state’s 631 recorded employees across three rows, and two of those three are at Paulden.
- What is the axle limit?20,000 lb on a single axle under A.R.S. § 28-1100, with the enforcement tolerance already inside that number. Do not add anything to it.
- 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.
Why people call
Those are the mechanics. The reasons behind a call are more personal than that.
Retiring. A medical that did not go the way it used to. A contract that ended, or an outfit that has grown out of one truck and into another and needs the first one gone. Rock Ridge Quarries at 41 employees and the sandstone quarry at 15 are the scale most people here actually work at, and around them sit the owner-operators who run the loads Drake Cement does not haul itself.
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, in Paulden and across Yavapai County.