We buy trucks in Woodside

Langley Hill Quarry works traprock with four people on the MSHA roll — a genuinely small operation — and it sits 5.97 miles from the centroid of the town the row is filed under. Within ten miles the National Bridge Inventory records 146 structures, of which one is posted for load and one coded below legal loads. That one is county-maintained and 5.53 miles out.

It is NBI record 35C0063, carrying Wurr Rd, rated 14.9 metric tonnes or about 16.4 US tons. Item 64 records the gross weight of the rating vehicle, so against the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump the crossing admits roughly 3.9 tonnes of stone. One restriction in 146 structures is 0.7 percent, against 1.4 percent of structures below legal loads across California as a whole.

Whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Redwood City, Menlo Park and Portola Valley carry pages of their own if the truck lives closer to one of those. The mix on this side of the hill runs light: box trucks and straight trucks on delivery, flatbeds and day cabs between the yards, dump trucks on the rock and grading side, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Those numbers come from a straight-line circle ten miles wide, and that is the limit worth understanding. At 64.1 percent of the nodes in this survey a tighter crossing lies somewhere between ten miles and twenty — so a cap read inside the circle is a minimum, and a route out over the ridge can meet something lower.

The same caution applies to the number itself. Two other nodes in the same batch return exactly 14.9 metric tonnes — one in San Diego County and one in Butte County, on county roads as much as four hundred miles from Wurr Rd. A repeated rating is a coincidence until the structure number matches, and a structure number is the only thing that establishes a shared crossing.

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.