We buy trucks in Vallejo

Lake Herman Quarry, worked by CalMat Co, carries 68 people on the MSHA roll — more than any other quarry in this lane — and its coordinates lie 4.47 miles from the city centroid, in Solano County. Within ten miles of it the FHWA National Bridge Inventory records 210 structures.

None of those 210 is coded below legal loads on item 70, so there is no commercial floor to report for this node at all. That is the useful half of the finding, and it is not the whole of it.

Whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Benicia, American Canyon and Fairfield carry pages of their own if the truck lives closer to one of those. The mix around the strait is industrial and marine: box trucks and straight trucks on distribution, flatbeds and day cabs between the yards, dump trucks on the rock side, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Because one of those 210 structures is coded posted for load on item 41. In the National Bridge Inventory a count of what is below legal loads and a count of what is posted are two different fields, and across Solano County here they disagree: nothing carries a rating low enough to give this node a commercial floor, and yet a driver still meets a sign at a crossing this measurement has no number for.

So the page reports both counts rather than calling this a clean run. Two more California nodes in the same survey batch show the same shape on large networks, one of them A R Wilson Quarry with 149 structures and a single posting. The rule that follows is simple enough: the sign on the structure is what governs, and no count taken from a file replaces reading 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.

That is the same code book that decides what a wreck does to your title, and it asks a question instead of setting a number. CVC § 544 makes a truck a total loss salvage vehicle when the owner, a leasing company, a financial institution or an insurer considers it uneconomical to repair and it is then not repaired.

So the figure people quote at you — 70 to 75 percent of actual cash value — comes from insurer practice and not from the vehicle code. It is worth knowing which of the two you are being told, because one of them is law and the other is a company’s own policy.

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. California has no numeric total-loss threshold at all — CVC § 544 asks whether repair is economical and leaves the judgement to the owner, the lender or the insurer — so no percentage decides anything here before we have looked.

How does it get collected, and how am I paid? However it goes, there is no clock on it: we come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you drive it to us. Payment is cash or electronic payment.