We buy trucks in Ione

MSHA records 15 employees at the Jackson Valley Quarry, in Amador County, whose coordinates lie 3.95 miles from the centroid of this place. Fifteen people is a proper plant, and a proper plant turns its own fleet rather than borrowing one.

Nothing on this page is going to tell you what that fleet is worth. What we will say is that the trucks that come off a plant like this are usually well documented by the people who ran them, and that documentation is the part worth sending us.

Those roads are clear on the record. Within ten miles the National Bridge Inventory records 35 structures and not one is coded posted for load on item 41 or below legal loads on item 70. Amador County posts one of the 29 bridges it maintains, and this node is not near it.

That is worth setting against the foothills either side. California is the mildest road environment measured across sixteen states, at 1.4% of structures below legal loads — and its three tightest crossings are in the Sierra Nevada foothills: a plant in Butte County capped at 13.3 metric tonnes, admitting about 2.3 tonnes of stone; one in El Dorado at 14.3 admitting 3.3; another in El Dorado at 14.6 admitting 3.6. El Dorado posts five of its 80 bridges, Butte eleven of 247, Tuolumne one of 54. A state rate tells you nothing about a foothill county.

One question we cannot answer sits under all of it. Seasonal and frost-law restrictions are listed as not determined in the state rule file we work from, and the Sierra Nevada and its foothills are exactly where such a rule would apply if it exists. Not determined is not the same as absent.

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

Jackson, Sutter Creek, Plymouth and Amador City all carry pages of their own, and none of them is far. 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. 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 if the road up is a question, the remote version settles it. Payment is cash or electronic payment.