We buy trucks in Homestead Valley

The node our records place nearest this community is a Marine Corps installation, and it resolves 17.47 miles away, in San Bernardino County. Homestead Valley is an unincorporated community; the installation is not in it, and this page is not going to write as though it were.

We are saying that out loud because the alternative is the standard way these pages go wrong. A large facility seventeen miles off is not a fact about the road outside your gate, and dressing one up as the other is how a page ends up telling a seller something nobody checked.

Those seventeen miles are a symptom of the size of the thing. The installation occupies 596,000 acres of the southern Mojave Desert — 932 square miles — and there is no incorporated place anywhere inside it. With Camp Pendleton at about 125,000 acres, that is roughly 721,000 acres of this state in Marine Corps hands, and this one alone is nearly five times Pendleton.

It is the fourth case in our records of a node larger than the geography around it, after Piñon Canyon at 29.86 miles, White Sands at 24.34 and the Goldwater Range at 19.87. Population, unit strength and training activity were not established, so no number for any of those appears here.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Out in the basin 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.

Twentynine Palms, Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree and Morongo Valley all carry pages of their own, and they are the towns most people out here actually drive to. If the truck sits behind a gate anywhere, say so on the form and we will sort access first.

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 a desert distance is a poor reason to hold up a sale. 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.