Sell your semi truck for cash in Chelsea the easy and convenient way

Chelsea Milling turns out 1.6 million boxes of mix a day from a single plant with just over 300 people, and it is vertically integrated to the point of making its own cardboard boxes. That last detail is the one that tells you what kind of operation it is.

It is also the only operator in this whole body of research that runs its own truck fleet. Product goes out across the Midwest on company-owned trucks and to the rest of the country by commercial carriers, and bulk sugar and shortening can come in by rail when required. Most of the grain is gathered within a 150 mile radius and arrives by truck.

So there are two entirely different trucking jobs meeting at one gate: a long inbound grain haul from all over southern Michigan, and a short-to-medium outbound distribution run in a company livery. They wear equipment in opposite ways.

Those two jobs are the clearest illustration in this state of what Michigan’s weight statute actually does. It permits a maximum gross of 164,000 lb on a combination of up to eleven axles — the highest regularly usable truck weight in North America, with eleven the ceiling since 1967 — reached by allowing more axles each carrying less rather than heavier axles.

Packaged mix is cube freight. It fills a trailer long before it weighs one, so that 164,000 lb allowance is available to the outbound fleet and completely useless to it. And when the state reduces axle and wheel loads through March, April and May — 25 percent on concrete pavements and concrete-based roads, 35 percent on everything else — the outbound leg barely notices, because it was nowhere near the axle limits to begin with.

The inbound grain haul is the opposite. Grain is weight-limited, so it sits on those axle limits every trip and takes the full seasonal cut. One gate, one statute, and two fleets that experience it completely differently. A powertrain plant elsewhere in this state can say neither of those things — everything it ships is heavy.

On paper the rule is one sentence. We need a title — unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Everything after that is a fix rather than a category: a lost title has a counter replacement, and where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither one stops a sale.

Gross and axle limits at MCL 257.722, read from the Michigan Vehicle Code and the Michigan Department of Transportation’s Maximum Legal Truck Loadings and Dimensions. Information, not legal advice.

Both halves of that are trucks we buy. Box trucks and straight trucks off the distribution work — the cube-freight fleet, which tends to wear its body out while the chassis stays sound. Grain hauls and farm trucks off the inbound side, which is the reverse. Day cabs, flatbeds, dump trucks off the road work, and service bodies, work trucks and pickups off crews across Washtenaw County.

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

We can come to you and drive it away, come to you and tow it, or buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting at all. You are welcome to bring it to us too. The country between here and Ann Arbor is easy for any of that.

• 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 box is beaten up but the chassis is fine.That is exactly what a cube-freight life does, and it is ordinary around a plant like Chelsea Milling. Tell us which is which and we will know what we are looking at.
• It hauled grain in from a long way out.Then it is the opposite case — weight-limited every trip, so the wear went into brakes, driveline and suspension while the body stayed sound. Most of the grain here comes from inside a 150 mile radius, and that is a lot of loaded miles.
• It was a company truck rather than an owner-operator rig.Makes no difference to us. Tell us who ran it and how it was maintained, because a fleet-maintained truck usually has a history we would like to hear.
• How am I paid?Cash or electronic payment. That is the whole list.
• 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 is a bonded route.

None of those questions is usually the reason for the call. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended and never got replaced. A box truck standing behind a yard in Washtenaw County, or a grain hauler off the 150 mile catchment, that ran the same route for a decade and has not moved since the route was cut, with insurance going out every month on something that isn’t turning a wheel.

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.