We buy trucks in Irwindale

MSHA records 12 employees at Azusa Rock, whose coordinates lie 3.78 miles from the centroid of this place. This is quarry ground inside a metropolitan area, which is unusual almost everywhere else and ordinary here.

It also means the trucks working it spend their lives on city streets rather than haul roads. That shows up in the brakes, the clutch and the tyres long before it shows up on the odometer, and it is worth telling us which kind of life a truck has had.

Those streets are measured more densely here than anywhere else in the state. Within ten miles the National Bridge Inventory records 472 structures — the densest network measured anywhere in California and the second densest anywhere, behind 769 around a mine in Indianapolis. Five of the 472 are coded below legal loads, which is 1.1%, and not one of those five is county-maintained.

The binding one is a city street. The record carrying Acacia Street has maintenance code 04 on item 21 — a city or municipal highway agency — is rated 24.3 metric tonnes, and sits 6.64 miles out; item 64 records the gross weight of the rating vehicle, so it admits about 13.3 tonnes of stone over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump.

That is the part worth carrying away. In the largest county in the United States by population, a quarry’s cap is set by a city, not by the county: Los Angeles County posts four of the 276 bridges it maintains, while California’s cities hold 5,081 structures, 19.6% of the state total and the largest municipal tier measured in sixteen states. Ring the city.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Across the San Gabriel Valley that means the pits’ dump trucks and aggregate haulers, day cabs and road tractors, box trucks and straight trucks on distribution, flatbeds between the yards, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Azusa is next door, with Baldwin Park, Duarte and Covina around it, and all four carry pages of their own. The truck does not have to be in any particular one of them for us to look at it.

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 town we usually come to you and either drive it away or tow it; we also buy remotely and arrange the tow, and you can drive it to us. Payment is cash or electronic payment.