We buy trucks in Los Gatos

Lexington Quarry works crushed and broken stone as a surface operation, with 4 employees on the MSHA record, and its coordinates lie 2.43 miles from the Census 2024 Gazetteer centroid of the town, in Santa Clara County. It sits above the creek in the first fold of the hills rather than out on the valley floor, and that placement is the whole story of the roads it works.

A four-person quarry in the hills runs a small, hard-worked fleet. What a truck hauled and what has been replaced on it tells us more here than its mileage does, because the mileage was earned on grades rather than on flat ground.

Those grades come with the tightest crossings on this side of the hills. Within ten miles the National Bridge Inventory records 371 structures; 9 are coded posted for load on item 41 and 8 are coded below legal loads on item 70, and all 8 of those are county-maintained. The nearest is 3.33 miles away. The lowest operating rating among them is 8.4 metric tonnes, and the lowest that reaches the 11.0-tonne floor an empty tandem dump needs is 11.3 tonnes — about 12.5 US tons.

Two of them tell the story on their own. Both carry Aldercroft Heights Road over the creek, a quarter of a mile apart, both maintained by the county, rated 11.3 and 8.4 metric tonnes. An empty tandem dump weighs about 11.0 tonnes: so the lower crossing does not take a commercial vehicle at all, even empty, and the upper one takes it empty plus roughly three hundred kilograms of payload. That road is closed to a loaded truck in both directions by two bridges over the same water. Item 64 records the gross weight of the rating vehicle, which is what makes that arithmetic work.

Read the rest of it as an upper bound rather than a guarantee. Those figures are the minimum inside a ten-mile circle, and at 64.1% of the sites measured this way a tighter crossing turns up between ten miles and twenty. Santa Clara County posts 10 of the 162 bridges it maintains, so this is a county that does post — which makes the ones it has posted worth taking seriously. If your truck is up one of these roads and loaded, tell us where it is and we will work the route out rather than send someone to find out the hard way.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. In the Santa Cruz Mountains and on the ground below them that means the quarry’s dump trucks and aggregate haulers first, then flatbeds moving plant, work trucks on tree and utility work up the canyons, box trucks on distribution, and pickups everywhere.

Monte Sereno and Campbell are next door, with Saratoga west, San Jose out on the flat and Scotts Valley over the summit; all five 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. Up 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 to it is one of the posted ones, remote is usually the simplest. Payment is cash or electronic payment.