We buy trucks in Cotati

MSHA’s Mine Data Retrieval System records 20 employees at the Soiland Co., Inc., whose coordinates lie 1.47 miles from the centroid of this place. That is about as close as an aggregate operation gets to the middle of a town, and it is why the truck traffic here is local traffic rather than something passing through.

A yard that size loads and turns all day on short hauls, which is hard on a truck in a way that mileage does not capture. If yours came off work like that, say so — hours and duty cycle tell us more than the odometer does.

Those hauls run over one of the better-measured stretches of road in the state. Within ten miles of the yard the National Bridge Inventory records 228 structures — a dense network by any standard — and exactly one of them is coded posted for load, the same one coded below legal loads, county-maintained, 6.29 miles out.

Its operating rating is 21.4 metric tonnes, about 23.6 US tons. Item 64 records the gross weight of the rating vehicle, so that admits something like 10.4 tonnes of stone over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump. One restriction in 228 structures is a mild road environment, and the state as a whole is milder still: 1.4% of California’s structures are coded below legal loads, the lowest of the sixteen states measured for this work.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. On this stretch the mix is corridor work: the yard’s dump trucks and aggregate haulers, box trucks and straight trucks on distribution, flatbeds and day cabs between the two, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Rohnert Park is next door and Penngrove, Petaluma and Santa Rosa all carry pages of their own, so if the truck lives closer to one of those, start there. The form is the same wherever you start it.

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. Close in like this we usually come to you and either drive it away or tow it; we also buy remotely and arrange the tow, and you can drive it to us. Payment is cash or electronic payment.