We buy trucks in Port St. Lucie

The mine filed here is the Fort Pierce Mine, with six people on the MSHA registration. Within ten miles of it the National Bridge Inventory records 61 structures: five are posted for load on item 41, one is coded below legal loads on item 70, and that one is county-maintained. The nearest of them is 8.66 miles away.

The number that matters is 28.0 metric tonnes — the lowest operating rating among them, about 30.9 US tons. Item 64 records the gross weight of the rating vehicle, so once you take off the roughly 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump, that crossing admits about 17.0 tonnes of stone and no more.

Read it in three bands. Below 11.0 tonnes no commercial vehicle crosses at all, even empty. Between 11.0 and 36.3 tonnes it takes a truck only part loaded. At or above 36.3 tonnes a legal load crosses whole.

So there is a Florida limb the bands alone do not show. A single-unit dump truck is capped at 70,000 lb in this state — 31.75 tonnes — rather than the 36.3 a combination grosses, so for this trade the useful band closes 4.5 tonnes below the figure the crossing itself would allow.

Which means the binding constraint on an aggregate run out of St. Lucie County is sometimes the statute and sometimes the structure, and a driver has to know which one is in front of them. Statewide 4.4% of Florida structures are coded below legal loads, so it is a small number of crossings doing all of the work.

The mine also sits 6.84 miles from the centroid of the city its own row names, which is the ordinary office-address gap rather than a location.

Which is worth setting against the state picture, because St. Lucie is an outlier inside it. Florida maintains 45.1% of its structures at state level and its counties 31.0%, with a toll authority and the cities holding most of the rest — so the county-maintained subset is one tier of four and is reported here as one.

St. Lucie County posts 34.6% of what it maintains. Pasco County posts 1.8%. That is a factor of nineteen inside one state, and it is why a figure quoted for Florida as a whole tells a driver in this county almost nothing about the road in front of them.

For a seller it lands in one place only: an aggregate truck from here has spent its life inside a tighter envelope than the statewide numbers suggest, and that shows up as trip count rather than as tonnage.

So the statute deserves stating in full rather than in summary. Florida sets a single-axle limit of 20,000 lb and a gross limit of 80,000 lb including all enforcement tolerances.

Then subsection 6: a single-unit vehicle used as a dump truck, mixer, waste vehicle or fuel tanker is limited to 20,000 lb per axle plus scale tolerance and may not exceed 70,000 lb gross including the weight of the vehicle. The divisible-load permit adds ten per cent off the interstate system only and expressly does not reach those vehicles — so the trucks this trade turns over are the trucks the relief was written past.

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

Those are the load. The paperwork is what decides how fast a sale closes. We need a title unless the truck is old enough that it never had one, and a lost one has a counter replacement; where none exists there is a bonded route.

The plate stays in the owner’s name and comes off the truck — onto a replacement vehicle of the same class, or back to the county tax collector.

Where an insurer has been involved, Florida brands salvage at 80% of the cost to replace the vehicle with one of like kind and quality. Replacement cost is a different base from the retail and market-value ones other states use, so a percentage carried in from elsewhere does not transfer.

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

All of it is iron we buy across St. Lucie County. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the Fort Pierce Mine, held to 70,000 lb where a combination gets 80,000 lb, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds and lowboys, box trucks, tankers, rollbacks, service bodies and the pickups that go with a crew — the same up at Fort Pierce and across at White City.

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 has run part loaded for years because of a bridge. Does that hurt it?No. Around St. Lucie County the lowest operating rating near the Fort Pierce Mine is 28.0 tonnes, which admits about 17.0 tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare, so part-loaded running is a routing fact rather than a fault. It shows as trip count, and we read hours accordingly.
• 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 haul contract off the Fort Pierce Mine that ended and left one tipper standing in a St. Lucie County yard, 6.84 miles from the city on its paperwork, 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.