We buy trucks in Foresthill

Big Seam has 8 employees and has been active on the federal safety register since 18 January 2023, under Focused Mining Enterprises, in Placer County. A date like that is worth having: it tells you the equipment working there was either bought or brought back into service around then.

Eight people underground or on a bench is a small operation, and small operations keep trucks. The ones that come out of them are usually well described by whoever ran them, which is the part of the form worth taking time over.

That federal record has no state counterpart. Big Seam has no match in the state’s Mine Reclamation register, and the nearest name-similar record in it is a mine reclaimed in 1995, which is a different thing entirely.

Two registers exist because they answer different questions — one is a safety register and one is a reclamation register — so a working mine can sit in one and not the other. Why this one does was not established, and we are not going to guess at it. It matters here only as a caution: if you are checking an operator behind a truck, one register saying nothing is not the same as the operator not existing.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. On this ridge that means log trucks and timber rigs, the mine’s dump trucks and aggregate haulers, flatbeds moving plant up a long road, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Auburn, North Auburn, Meadow Vista and Colfax all carry pages of their own and all of them are down off the ridge. Start wherever the truck actually sits.

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. Up a road like this one the usual path is that we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, so the sale does not wait on anybody driving the ridge. 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.