We buy trucks in Madera

MSHA records 19 employees at the Austin Quarry, working crushed and broken stone, and its coordinates lie 12.96 miles from the Census 2024 Gazetteer centroid of the city, up in the Madera County foothills. Nineteen is a middling crew by the standards of this trade — big enough to run a real fleet, small enough that every truck in it is known by name.

Thirteen miles is far enough that the quarry and the city are different kinds of place. The rock comes down to the valley; the farm traffic never goes up. A truck sold here has usually done one of those two jobs and not the other, and which one it was tells us more than the odometer.

That haul meets no recorded restriction. Within ten miles of the quarry the National Bridge Inventory records 37 structures, and not one of them is coded posted for load on item 41 or below legal loads on item 70. It is a measured zero rather than a gap in the record, which is a distinction worth keeping.

Size it before you lean on it, though. Thirty-seven structures is a modest network, and the tier that does the restricting in this state is the county: California maintains 47.9% of its structures at state level, its counties 28.3% and its cities 19.6%, with a further 517 held by the US Forest Service. If you do meet a posting on a back road out of these foothills, Madera County is the tier to ring.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Out across the Central Valley floor that means farm trucks and flatbeds off the almonds, grapes and pistachios first, then the quarry’s dump trucks and aggregate haulers, box trucks on distribution, day cabs running the valley highways, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Madera Acres is next door and Chowchilla north, with Kerman and Firebaugh out west, Fresno south, and Coarsegold and Oakhurst up in the Sierra Nevada foothills; all of them 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. Around 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. Payment is cash or electronic payment.