We buy trucks in Valley Springs

Hogan Quarry, worked by Foothill Materials, Inc., carries six people on the MSHA roll and works crushed and broken stone. It sits 2.91 miles from the centroid of the CDP the row is filed under, in Calaveras County — close enough that the row and the place genuinely describe each other.

Within ten miles of it the National Bridge Inventory records 49 structures, and not one is coded posted for load on item 41 or below legal loads on item 70. That is a thin network by the standards of this survey, which is what you would expect in foothill country, and none of them carries a restriction in the file.

Whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. San Andreas, Jackson and Angels carry pages of their own if the truck lives closer to one of those. The mix up here is small and rural: dump trucks on the rock and ranch side, flatbeds and day cabs on haulage, box trucks on delivery, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Both of those need holding apart, because a small count and a clean count are easy to run together. Forty-nine structures inside a ten-mile circle is a sparse network by the standards of the National Bridge Inventory, and a sparse network in Calaveras County has fewer chances to carry a restriction in the first place.

Then there is the reach of the measurement. The circle is ten miles wide, and at 64.1 percent of the nodes in this survey a tighter crossing lies somewhere between ten miles and twenty — so a clean reading here is a floor rather than a promise about a route out of the county. What is on the structure governs.

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 same code book handles what damage does to a title, and California is unusual in how it does it. CVC § 544 defines a total loss salvage vehicle as one that the owner, a leasing company, a financial institution or an insurer considers uneconomical to repair, and which is consequently not repaired. There is no number in the law.

Most California insurers work to internal thresholds of somewhere around 70 to 75 percent of actual cash value. Those are company policies, not statute, and they must not be read as a legal threshold — the same damaged truck can brand in Kentucky, run a formula in Georgia, and be a judgement call here.

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? 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.