We buy trucks in Memphis

The row filed here is a rail yard at Port Manatee, attached to a Manatee County community 6.82 miles away. The name is the whole difficulty: a script matching on it alone would send a Florida deep-water port to Tennessee.

So it is worth saying plainly. This page is about the small place on the southern shore of Tampa Bay, in Manatee County, and the port beside it is a deep-water cargo port rather than a river terminal.

Traffic through the yard was not determined. Port Manatee’s character as a deep-water port is a description of the district, not a measurement of that yard, and no measurement is going to be invented to fill the space.

So what rolls around here is shaped by the apron rather than the interstate. What a deep-water port puts on the road is short-haul work — that is the nature of a port rather than a measured figure for this one, and this yard’s own traffic was not determined.

Short-trip work decides what a truck looks like at the end of it: hours ahead of miles, a great many starts, long waits between loads, and brakes and clutches that have done far more cycles than the odometer implies.

A single-unit dump truck is capped at 70,000 lb in Florida where a combination gets 80,000 lb, so on aggregate and construction material off a Manatee County port the trip count climbs faster than the tonnage suggests.

Which brings the name back around, because it is not only a mapping problem. Paperwork on a truck that has worked the Port Manatee yard sometimes carries a city field reading as somewhere else entirely, and an attachment 6.82 miles out from the yard is exactly the kind of gap that produces one.

None of that stops a sale. It does mean that on a Manatee County truck we read the coordinate and the county before we read the city, and that we would rather ask than assume when a field looks wrong.

The plate is a separate matter again, and Florida handles it in a way that surprises people who have sold elsewhere.

So take them in the order they come up. We need a title unless the truck is old enough that it never had one; a lost title has a counter replacement, and where none exists there is a bonded route.

The plate stays in the owner’s name and comes off the truck rather than going with it — transferred to a replacement vehicle of the same class, or surrendered to the county tax collector.

And if an insurer has been involved, Florida brands salvage where repair costs reach 80% of the cost to replace the vehicle with one of like kind and quality. That base is replacement cost, which is a different number from the retail or market-value bases other states use, so a percentage from another state does not transfer.

Fla. Stat. § 320.0609(1)(a) and § 319.30(3)(a). Information, not legal advice.

Those are the paperwork. The weight rule is the load.

Florida allows 80,000 lb gross including all enforcement tolerances and 20,000 lb on a single axle, and caps a single-unit dump truck, mixer, waste vehicle or fuel tanker at 70,000 lb. The divisible-load permit adds ten per cent off the interstate system only and does not reach those single-unit vehicles.

Fla. Stat. § 316.535 and § 316.550(4). Information, not legal advice.

All of it is iron we buy across Manatee County. Day cabs and road tractors off Port Manatee, dump trucks and aggregate haulers held to 70,000 lb where a combination gets 80,000 lb, flatbeds and lowboys, box trucks, tankers, rollbacks, service bodies and the pickups that go with a crew — the same through Palmetto and Ellenton.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.

• Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Rust is not a disqualifier.
• The engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled out and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
• Are you in Tennessee?No. This page is the Manatee County one, on the southern shore of Tampa Bay, beside Port Manatee. The two share a name and nothing else.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.

Beyond a truck that has simply done its turns, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A drayage contract off Port Manatee that ended and left one day cab standing in a Manatee County yard with nothing booked for it.

Most of those aren’t happy reasons, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.