We buy trucks in Forestville

MSHA records 15 employees at the Canyon Rock Co Inc, whose coordinates lie 2.85 miles from the centroid of this place. That is a mid-sized crushed-stone operation on the edge of a small town, and its loads leave on the same roads everybody else here uses.

An operation that size runs a fleet of its own and runs it hard on short hauls. If your truck came off work like that, the useful things to tell us are the hours and the duty cycle rather than the odometer.

Those hauls cross a dense network. Within ten miles the National Bridge Inventory records 212 structures: five coded posted for load on item 41 and three coded below legal loads on item 70, all three of those county-maintained, with the nearest 1.89 miles away.

Note that the two counts differ. A posting is a sign put on a bridge and a rating is a number recorded in a file, and they do not always agree — here they differ by two structures, which is a reason to read a sign in front of you rather than a file behind it.

Of the ones that carry a number, the lowest operating rating is 16.8 metric tonnes, about 18.5 US tons. Item 64 records the gross weight of the rating vehicle, so that admits roughly 5.8 tonnes of stone over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump — a crossing a loaded truck takes part loaded or not at all.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Along here that means the Canyon Rock dump trucks and aggregate haulers, log trucks and timber rigs off the higher ground, flatbeds moving plant, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Guerneville is down the river and Graton, Sebastopol and Santa Rosa are the other way; all four carry pages of their own. It is the same form whichever one you start 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. Here we can come to you and drive it away, come to you and tow it, buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you can drive it to us — and with a posted crossing between you and the main road, the remote version is often the simplest. Payment is cash or electronic payment.