We buy trucks in Independence

The quarry here reports 3 employees to MSHA and is carried as a surface operation working industrial sand, under mine identifier 0405959, with Grinding Rock Aggregates as the operator of record, in Inyo County. That is a three-person crew in a valley with very little else industrial in it.

What the product is used for, and where it goes, were not established. We leave it there rather than reason from the commodity, because the destination question is the one these records most often cannot answer.

That county is the reason to be careful with any road statistic you are handed about this place. Inyo County posts none of the 33 bridges it maintains — and Inyo is over ten thousand square miles, larger than nine US states.

Thirty-three county bridges spread across a county that size is not a network in any useful sense, so a posting rate calculated from it is not a figure about anything a truck actually meets. The useful question in the Owens Valley is the specific road, not the county average, and if you tell us the road we will look at the road.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Up and down this valley that means end dumps and bulk trailers off the sand, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, flatbeds and day cabs on the long runs, box trucks on distribution, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Lone Pine is south of here, Big Pine and Bishop north, and all three carry pages of their own. They are also a long way apart, which is the single biggest thing that shapes how a sale gets finished here.

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. In the Owens Valley the realistic path is usually that we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, because the distances are what they are. 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.