We buy trucks in Starke

The mineral-sands row filed under this page sits in Clay County, while the town it is filed under sits in Bradford County. That is the class of mismatch a 10,745-row cross-check found worst, at 7.95% — a row assigned to the city its source named rather than to the city its coordinate falls in.

Here the source has a good reason. The state’s own permit register carries the site as Trail Ridge South Plant Site, operated by The Chemours Company, at an address in this town — and the permitted plant sits 3.35 miles from the node. So the county field and the address field disagree while both are defensible, which is a different situation from a row that is simply wrong.

The register has carried the operation as active since the last day of 1975. That is fifty-one years, and the survey records it as tied for the longest continuous tenure in the slice it has measured.

So the commodity decides the trucking, and this commodity is unusual. Heavy mineral sands here come from ilmenite and rutile concentrated in ancient beach ridges, taken by surface excavation and separated by gravity, magnetic and electrostatic methods rather than crushed.

The Chemours Company runs it as feedstock for titanium dioxide pigment, and what that means on the road is enormous tonnage at very low value per tonne. The survey names it as among the most weight-sensitive freight in the slice, and gives the reason plainly: when the load is worth little and weighs a great deal, every pound of the schedule is the whole margin.

A truck working that around Bradford County is a truck that has been run at its ceiling for its entire life, deliberately and by design.

Which makes one line of the weight law louder here than anywhere. A single-unit vehicle used as a dump truck, mixer, waste vehicle or fuel tanker may not exceed 70,000 lb gross, where a tractor-trailer combination gets 80,000 lb.

That is ten thousand pounds of difference for the same truck in a different configuration. On freight worth little per tonne, that gap is not a detail of the schedule, it is the reason a fleet is configured the way it is.

So on anything sold out of this end of Bradford County we look first at what it was configured to do, because that is what it has spent its life doing.

So here is the whole of it rather than the one line. Florida allows 80,000 lb gross including all enforcement tolerances and 20,000 lb on a single axle.

The single-unit cap of 70,000 lb gross includes the weight of the vehicle. The divisible-load permit adds ten per cent off the interstate system only, and the record is explicit that the increase does not apply to those single-unit vehicles.

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; a lost title has a counter replacement, and where none exists there is a bonded route.

The salvage test here is worth reading carefully, because the percentage is the part people quote and the base is the part that matters. This state brands at eighty per cent of the cost to replace the vehicle with one of like kind and quality — not of its market value, and not of its value before the damage. For an older commercial truck those are very different numbers.

The plate stays in the owner’s name rather than going with the truck — onto a replacement vehicle of the same class, or back to the county tax collector.

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

All of it is iron we buy across Bradford County. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers held to 70,000 lb where a combination gets 80,000 lb, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, tankers, box trucks, rollbacks, service bodies and the pickups that go with a crew — the same north at Lawtey and east at Keystone Heights.

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.
• The plant address says this town but the site is in the next county. Which do I put down?Whichever your paperwork already says. The state permit register gives an address here while the row itself falls in Clay County rather than Bradford County, and both are defensible. We read the coordinate and the truck.
• It has been run at its limit for twenty years. Is that held against it?No. On freight this weight-bound that is what the truck was bought to do, and a truck run to a schedule is often in better order than one run without one. Tell us what it carried and we read the frame accordingly.
• Do you come out?Yes. We can come to you and drive it away, or come to you and tow it. We can also buy it where it stands and arrange the tow with no visit at all, and you’re welcome to bring it to us if that suits you better.
• 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 off The Chemours Company end of the ridge that went away and left one tipper standing in a Bradford 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.