We buy trucks in Ducor

MSHA records 2 employees at Fountain Springs, whose coordinates lie 7.29 miles from the centroid of this place. Two people is a pit that runs when there is work and stands when there is not, which is the pattern most of the equipment out here follows.

Equipment on that pattern tends to be old, paid for and kept running by whoever owns it. None of that is a problem at this end. What matters to us is whether the truck is complete, and the answer to that is usually known precisely by the person who has been keeping it going.

That road out has a restriction on it, and this is the honest version of what we know about it. Within ten miles the National Bridge Inventory records 22 structures. None is coded posted for load on item 41; one is coded below legal loads on item 70, county-maintained, 5.12 miles away — and it carries no operating rating in the file at all.

So the restriction is recorded and what it holds is not, which means we report the count and the distance and no commercial floor. Not knowing and knowing there is no limit are different facts and we are not going to collapse them into one.

The same structure is read by a second pit, Decomposed Granite Pit, 9.61 miles from it and seeing 88 structures inside its own ten miles. Both come to the same blank. Tulare County maintains 361 bridges — the largest county-maintained inventory this research has met in the state — and posts one of them, and the one it posts is the unrated one.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. This is row-crop and orchard country, so farm trucks and grain hauls come first, with the pit’s dump trucks and aggregate haulers behind them, flatbeds moving plant, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Terra Bella and Richgrove are the nearest places carrying pages of their own, with Porterville and Earlimart further up the same side of Tulare County. Start wherever the truck actually sits — the form does not care which page you came in on.

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. Out here the usual path is that we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, so nothing waits on somebody driving down. We also come to you and drive it away, come to you and tow it, or you drive it to us. Payment is cash or electronic payment.