We buy trucks in Miami

Five quarry registrations in Miami-Dade County carry 656 employees between them — White Rock Quarries at 205, Pennsuco at 163, FEC Quarry at 142, Miami Quarry at 91 and Krome Quarry at 55. That is the largest concentration of quarry employment in our file anywhere, and White Rock is the second largest single registration in it.

The Miami Cement Plant sits in the same trade with 136 people, working cement as CEMEX Construction Materials Florida.

Four of the registrations are filed under Miami itself, and they are not all equally close to it: Miami Quarry eleven miles out, FEC Quarry twelve, Krome eighteen and SDI Aggregates twenty-nine. We give the distances rather than let a city name imply a pin downtown.

So the truck at the centre of all that is not a highway tractor. It is a dump truck loading at a pit and discharging inside a metro — short legs, many of them, all day, on a duty cycle that idles far more than it runs.

Mixers work the same shape out of the Miami Cement Plant, and stone out of Krome Quarry does too: many discharges a day inside a coastal strip that is also the whole market. Florida is flat, so brakes and cooling are not the constraint they are in mountain country. Traffic and access are.

What that does to a truck is real and none of it reaches the odometer. Constant loading, low-speed manoeuvring on pit floors and in tight yards, and hours that never turned into miles.

Those single-unit trucks meet a ceiling of their own, and it is lower than the one everybody quotes.

Florida sets a single axle at 20,000 lb and a gross of 80,000 lb including all enforcement tolerances. Subsection 6 is the one that decides this trade: a single-unit vehicle used as a dump truck, a concrete mixer, a waste collection vehicle or a fuel tanker may not exceed 70,000 lb gross. That is ten thousand pounds under the same truck configured as a combination.

The divisible-load permit that adds ten per cent does not reach them either, and it is void on the interstate system in any case. So the binding number here is a fact about how the truck is built.

Fla. Stat. § 316.535, subsections 1, 4, 5 and 6, with § 316.550(4). Information, not legal advice.

Which is unusual, because the network around these pits adds almost nothing to that ceiling.

Within ten miles of Krome Quarry the National Bridge Inventory records 202 structures and not one of them is posted for load or coded below legal loads — the largest clean network in our file. FEC Quarry meets 3 restricted crossings out of 473 and Miami Quarry 3 out of 475, and the lowest rating among them still admits about ten tonnes of stone over the tare of an empty tandem dump.

SDI Aggregates is the case that needs care. None of the 93 structures near it is coded below legal loads, but three of them are posted for load — so a driver meets a sign at a crossing the data holds no cap for. Across the state Florida posts 819 structures and codes 579 below legal loads, and we would rather name that disagreement than call the node clean.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off Krome Quarry and the pits either side of it. Mixers off the Miami Cement Plant. Day cabs and road tractors, box trucks and straight trucks on the distribution end, flatbeds, tankers, service bodies, rollbacks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

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.
• It is a single-unit dump with low miles and huge hours. Is that a problem?No, and it is the normal shape of a truck here. Tell us the hours; we would rather have those than the odometer.
• 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.
• Can you collect from a pit or a yard?Yes. A working site is where most of these trucks are — a pit floor at Krome Quarry, the gate at White Rock Quarries, a kerb outside a job — and getting it out is our end of the job.

Beyond a truck that has simply done its turns, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A job that finished and left one dump truck more than the next one needs, at a pit gate or outside the Miami Cement Plant — and against a 70,000 lb ceiling it was never going to out-earn a combination anyway.

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.