We buy trucks in Arcata

MSHA records 1 employee at the Ford Quarries, 5.65 miles from the centroid of this city. That is as small as an operation on this list gets — three other California rows report a single person too — and it is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up as an industry.

A one-person operation still runs a truck, and often an old one kept going past the point most fleets would have replaced it. Those are the vehicles where condition and history matter far more than the year on the door.

Those roads are clear on the record. Within ten miles of the Ford Quarries node the 2025 National Bridge Inventory records 59 structures and not one of them is coded posted for load or below legal loads, out to the full 5.65 miles that separate it from the town.

Read it as an upper bound rather than a promise — a clean circle at ten miles can still have a tighter crossing just outside it. It does fit the wider picture, though: statewide only 1.4% of structures are coded below legal loads, which makes this the mildest road environment measured across seventeen states.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. This is Humboldt County timber ground, so log trucks and timber rigs work it alongside flatbeds, dump trucks on the aggregate and construction side, box trucks on distribution, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

One thing we will not quote at you: California publishes a log-hauler exemption and it is not extracted into the state rule file we work from. Not extracted is not the same as does not exist, and on this coast it is the rule most likely to matter. Blue Lake and McKinleyville carry pages of their own.

That is state law rather than anything local, and it is the rule truck sellers misquote most often. CVC sections 35550 to 35558 set a statutory range of 34,000 to 80,000 lb by axle count and spacing, and § 35551(a) is a table rather than the federal Bridge Formula — no formula is declared in the statute at all.

The California table does not exactly match the Federal Bridge Table, including at three and four axles. So a configuration that is legal under one can be over under the other, and “it makes bridge formula” is a claim about which table you mean. If someone has told you your truck makes it, that is worth knowing before you repeat it.

Does it have to run? No. But 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. A missing bumper is nothing.

Do I need the title? We need a title, unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. If it is lost, that is a replacement through the DMV and we will walk you through it. If there is a lien on it, say so on the form — that is why the question asks whether the title is in hand rather than whether you own the truck, because those are different situations and they go different ways.

What if it has been in a wreck? Tell us what happened and we will look at it as it is. California sets no percentage: CVC § 544 makes it a judgement about whether repair is economical, so nothing is decided by a formula before we have seen the truck.

How does it get collected, and how am I paid? There is no clock on any of this. 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. Payment is cash or electronic payment.