We buy trucks at Edwards AFB

Edwards covers nearly 301,000 acres in the Mojave Desert, next to Rogers Dry Lakebed, which the Center for Land Use Interpretation records as the largest dry lake bed in North America. It is home to the Air Force Flight Test Center, which researches and develops aerospace weapons and rocket-propulsion systems, and to the NASA Flight Research Center. Its coordinate reverse-geocodes to Kern County.

Employment, the split between the Air Force and NASA, and what is being tested now were not established here, so this page does not put a number on any of them. An installation that size implies a lot of vehicle movement and implying is as far as it goes.

Those 301,000 acres are here for a reason that has nothing to do with acreage. A flat, hard, twenty-mile natural surface in a place with almost no weather is what experimental flight needs — and it is the same property of the same desert that puts the aircraft boneyard at Davis-Monthan in Tucson, where low humidity keeps metal from corroding.

Two Air Force facilities, five hundred miles apart, sited on one property of one desert for opposite purposes: one to fly things that have never flown, one to keep things that will never fly again. It is the fourth environment-specific test site in our records, after Aberdeen in Chesapeake Bay humidity from 1917, Dahlgren’s overwater gunnery from 1918 and Yuma’s Sonoran Desert heat from 1943. A visitor-information source calls this the site of more major milestones in flight than any other place on earth; we record that as reported and do not adopt it as a rank.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Out on the Antelope Valley floor the mix is dump trucks and aggregate haulers, flatbeds and day cabs, box trucks and straight trucks on distribution, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

What the distances change is not the offer but the collection. North Edwards is the nearest place with a page of its own, with Rosamond, Mojave and Boron on the other sides of the base. If the truck is behind a gate, tell us on the form and we will work out access before anything moves.

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 realistic path is usually that we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, because that does not wait on anyone driving across the desert. 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.