We buy trucks in Felton

The Mine Data Retrieval System records 12 employees at the quarry here, and its coordinates lie 1.00 miles from the centroid of this place. A mile is about as tight as that resolution gets, which means the quarry’s roads and the town’s roads are one set of roads.

Twelve people is a working plant rather than a seasonal pit, and a working plant turns its own trucks. When one of them is sold, what it did — loaded miles, hours, how many of those were on grade — describes it better than the year does.

Those roads carry a restriction sharp enough to be worth stating exactly. Within ten miles the National Bridge Inventory records 136 structures: three coded posted for load on item 41, three coded below legal loads on item 70, all three county-maintained, and the nearest of them 2.00 miles away.

The lowest operating rating among them is 9.4 metric tonnes. That is under the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump, which means no commercial vehicle crosses it at all, loaded or not. The lowest that clears that floor is 21.7 tonnes, about 23.9 US tons, and item 64 records the gross weight of the rating vehicle, so that one admits roughly 10.7 tonnes of stone over the same tare.

Which tier to ring about it is a fair question, and the answer is the county. A crossing near a Californian quarry may be maintained by the state, which holds 12,455 structures, a county at 7,356, a city at 5,081, the US Forest Service at 517, the National Park Service at 58 or the Army at 41 — and the county is the only one of those a seller can usefully telephone about a posting.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Up this valley that means the quarry’s dump trucks and aggregate haulers, log trucks off the ridges, flatbeds moving plant, box trucks on distribution, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Ben Lomond and Boulder Creek are further up the same road, with Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz below; all four carry pages of their own. It makes no difference which one you start from.

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. With a crossing like that one nearby, the path we most often take is to buy it remotely and arrange the tow, so the route is the tow operator’s problem rather than yours. 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.