We buy trucks in Lake Ozark

MSHA records 3 employees at IROCK #5, which the node list carries under Magruder Limestone Co, 1.13 miles from the middle of town.

Within ten miles the national bridge file counts 74 structures. Nine are coded posted for load on item 41 and nine are coded below legal loads on item 70, and the second is the load-restriction measure for this state.

Four of the restricted nine are county-maintained and the nearest is 0.89 miles away. The lowest rating among them is 9.9 tonnes — under the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump — so no commercial vehicle crosses that one at all, loaded or empty. The lowest that does admit one is rated 15.3 tonnes, about 16.9 US tons, which leaves roughly 4.3 tonnes of stone over that tare against the twenty-five a legal 80,000 lb truck carries.

A three-man pit with a crossing like that under a mile from it is not running a routing problem now and then. It is running one every day it loads.

That is not a fact about one pit. This is the country between the Missouri’s valley and the Lake of the Ozarks, where the Osage and the Gasconade cut deep into the Ozark rim and the Bagnell Dam has held the Osage back since 1931.

The road networks here are thin and the restriction rates are high. Camden 17.9 per cent, Miller 21.9, Morgan 22.0, Hickory 28.6, Osage 29.2 and Maries 33.3 per cent of county-maintained structures failing item 70 — against 12.7 per cent across Missouri’s counties, and against 1.0 per cent in Cole County immediately beside them.

Miller County’s own share of that is 14 of the 64 structures it maintains. The valleys need many small bridges, and many small bridges on a rural county’s budget is how a rate like that is arrived at.

The practical reading for a truck is that the route matters more here than the load does. Cole County sits next door at a fortieth of the rate, so this is a local condition rather than a Missouri one, and it does not follow a truck out of the district.

Whatever a given crossing allows, the statute sets the outer limit, and Missouri writes it in one place.

Missouri sets gross weight at 80,000 lb, a single axle at 20,000 lb and a tandem at 34,000 lb, and it keeps the federal ceiling in place by providing that nothing in the section allows a load heavier than Title 23 of the United States Code does.

Then subsection 6 does something none of the other states on file do for this trade. Any vehicle or combination running on highways other than the interstate system may go over the single-axle, tandem-axle and gross limits by up to two thousand pounds — and that allowance names no commodity at all. Everywhere else the relief is written for somebody in particular. Tennessee’s ten per cent names sand, coal, clay, shale and phosphate, and leaves crushed stone out. Kentucky’s names crushed stone first. Alabama gives nobody anything. Missouri gives everybody two thousand pounds once you are off the interstate, which at 80,000 lb is about two and a half per cent.

One thing in that section is genuinely unsettled and we are not going to tidy it up. Subsection 6 says the allowance may be taken against the gross limit. Subsection 3’s own 80,000 lb cap is written as subject to subsections 9, 10, 12, 13 and 14, and it does not name subsection 6. Both texts are on the books, and how they work together is not something the research resolved.

The commodity allowances Missouri does write are all built the same way and all stop in the same place. Grain and grain co-products may run ten per cent over during harvest; milk and livestock may reach 85,500 lb; local log trucks reach 109,600 lb. Every one of them applies only on highways other than the interstate system. That is not a quirk of Missouri drafting. Title 23 caps the Interstate System at 80,000 lb and no state can raise it, so any state allowance above 80,000 lb has to live off the interstate by construction. The state route is the loaded road and the interstate is the empty one.

One more thing separates Missouri from its neighbours: it prices an overload rather than stopping it. The fine runs by the pound on a rising scale — two cents for each pound of the first five hundred, five cents to a thousand, ten cents above that. What the section does not carry is a do-not-move rule. Tennessee makes it separately unlawful to move an overloaded truck until the load comes off, so an overweight truck there stops where it stands. Missouri lets it carry on and sends a bill. Those are different risks, and over a few years they produce different loading habits and a differently worn truck.

RSMo §§ 304.180 and 304.240; 23 U.S.C. § 127. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond weight, the paperwork comes down to a single sentence.

We need a title — unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Everything after that sentence is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Both are ordinary and neither one stops a sale.

Missouri’s salvage rule is worth a minute because it reaches almost nothing in the stock we buy. A vehicle is branded salvage only where the cost of repairs exceeds eighty per cent of the fair market value immediately before the damage, and where the damage happened no more than six years after the manufacturer’s model year designation. Both limbs have to be met, not either one.

Both numbers are outliers, and they pull the same way. Eighty per cent is the highest threshold on file — Kentucky, Alabama and Tennessee all brand at seventy-five. Six model years is the shortest age window found anywhere; Arkansas runs seven and Tennessee ten. Past that window the Missouri rule does not reach a vehicle at all, however badly it was damaged. For a used commercial truck the age limb is nearly always the operative one and the percentage nearly never is.

The repair side leaves out more here than in any other state on file: inflatable safety restraints, tires, sound systems, damage from hail, and sales tax on parts and materials. Kentucky excludes airbag reinstallation and nothing else. Two states can share a threshold and still be adding up different repair bills.

Where the brand does land, Missouri applies it on the way out rather than on the way in. A salvage vehicle is retitled only after an examination recorded on Form 551, carried out by an inspector of the Missouri State Highway Patrol or by the St. Louis city or county auto theft unit, and that certificate runs out six months from the date of inspection. The title issued afterwards carries the words PRIOR SALVAGE. Minnesota uses the same two words for the opposite end of the process, branding on acquisition; the same phrase means an incoming obligation in one state and an outgoing designation in the other.

RSMo § 301.010; Missouri Department of Revenue Form 551. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule was last checked.

All of that is equipment we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the stone. Day cabs, road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, end dumps and lowboys. Box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew. Around the pit, and across Miller County and Morgan County, the lake country turns over a steady amount of it.

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 — and you’re welcome to bring it to us if that suits you better.

• 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.
• It has spent its life working round bridges.Most trucks out of this country have. The nearest restricted crossing to this pit is 0.89 miles out and the lowest rating in that group is under the tare of an empty tandem, so going round is the normal case rather than the exception here. It is not a mark against the truck.
• It ran part loaded most of the time.Say so, but it is not a problem. A cap of 15.3 tonnes admits about 4.3 tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare, so part loaded is what these roads ask for. It tends to mean fewer hard miles rather than more.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route. Neither one stops a sale.
• 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 remotely and arrange the tow with no visit at all, and you’re welcome to drive it to us if that suits you better.
• How far out do you come?All of Miller County and the ones around it, Camden County and Morgan County included. Distance has never stopped a sale.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup.

Beyond a contract finishing, the reasons are mostly personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A partnership splitting and the equipment with it. A truck that stopped earning and has been sitting since, where every month it sits is another month of insurance 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. Across Miller County and Morgan County there is usually one sitting.