We buy trucks in Wacissa

CYD Cabbage Grove employs 21 people and the Perry Quarry 17, both on the Big Bend coast in Taylor County, the emptiest stretch of the Florida peninsula. Each has twelve structures within ten miles, with nothing posted for load and nothing coded below legal loads.

Both are genuine clean runs — both fields empty, which is worth saying because it is not always the case. Twelve is the second thinnest network we have measured anywhere.

And Taylor County posts six of the 36 bridges it maintains, one in six, while these two quarries inside it meet none of them. The county rate is a rate for the county. We publish both numbers rather than letting either stand for the other.

So route choice out here is about distance and which way out exists rather than about anything painted on a crossing. US 19 and US 98 are the roads out of Taylor County, and Tallahassee, 60 miles north-west, is the nearest market of any size.

That produces a particular kind of truck: long, steady two-lane running rather than short pit shuttles, with the loading and unloading at either end doing more of the wear than the driving does. 60 miles loaded and 60 back is a full day’s cycle.

The pit at the edge of Perry, in the same county, meets 46 structures inside the same ten-mile radius. Same county, same rules, four times the bridges — because it sits at the edge of a town and these two do not.

Which is worth a line, because elsewhere in this state we have flagged city distances as defects and it would be inconsistent to pass these without saying why.

Both pits resolve about 14 miles from the place they name — 14.37 and 14.29 — and both of those were computed from the coordinate rather than taken from an address written on a registration. The computed methods land close and stay close; the address method is the one that produced the 58-mile and 265-mile errors this lane has reported.

So fourteen miles here is geometry, not a filing error. The pits in Taylor County really are out that far from the nearest named place, because out here almost everything is.

Those long two-lane legs run under a limit written into the vehicle rather than the road.

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, against 80,000 lb for a combination including all enforcement tolerances. The divisible-load permit that adds ten per cent off the interstate system does not reach those vehicles at all — and out here almost nothing is interstate mileage, so the exclusion is the whole of the difference.

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

Those numbers stop mattering the day the truck changes hands, and the paperwork is what is left.

A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither is unusual and neither stops a sale.

The plate is the Florida detail people miss: it stays in the owner’s name and comes off the truck, to be moved to another vehicle of the same class or surrendered to the county tax collector.

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

All of it is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the two Taylor County pits, held to 70,000 lb where a combination gets 80,000 lb. Log trucks and timber rigs off the Big Bend woods. Day cabs and road tractors for the sixty-mile run, flatbeds, box trucks, tankers, rollbacks, service bodies and the pickups that go with a small 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.
• Do you actually come out this far?Yes, and where the drive makes no sense we buy the truck where it stands and arrange the tow instead. 60 miles to Tallahassee is the local scale of things in Taylor County, and it is our end of the job either way.
• 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 quarry contract in Taylor County that ended and left one truck standing with nothing booked for it, 60 miles from the only market that wanted what it carried.

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.