We buy trucks in Puxico

Puxico is in Stoddard County. The only researched site the node list attaches to it is a National Guard training area in the Mark Twain National Forest, and that site is not in the town: its coordinate reverse-geocodes to Butler County, 7.84 miles away.

So this page will not say there is an installation in Puxico, because there is not one. A forest training area is exactly the class of site whose nearest incorporated place is some distance off, and that is a fact about the forest rather than an error in the record.

Nor will it describe what the site does. Its acreage, its strength and its mission were not established by the research behind this page, and we are not going to fill that in from what a training area usually looks like. Absence of a figure and a figure of zero are different things, and only one of them is on the record here.

What that leaves is a page built on the rules rather than on a pit, and on this side of the state the rules have a wrinkle worth reading before you sell a truck.

That wrinkle is a length rule, and no other state read alongside Missouri has anything like it. Missouri keys legal length to how far you are from a highway system, on a published colour-coded route map.

More than 10 air miles from the Interstate or Designated Highway System, a tractor-semitrailer is held to 60 ft overall and truck-trailer combinations and towed units to 65 ft. More than 10 air miles from the Interstate or Primary Highway System, the trailer and the overall length come down to 53 ft and truck-trailer and towed units to 55 ft.

Read that as geography rather than as paperwork. The further out from the mapped systems a yard sits, the shorter the legal combination that can reach it, so the equipment that ends up working ground like this is chosen for the last ten miles rather than for the first hundred. Farm country on the edge of a national forest is precisely where that rule decides what a fleet looks like.

And it works the other way when the truck is sold. A shorter combination bought to reach an out-of-the-way yard is not a compromised machine; it is a machine specified for the place it worked, and it will suit somebody in the same position.

Beyond length, the weight rules are the ordinary Missouri ones with one useful edge.

Legal gross weight is 80,000 lb unless the equipment is specialised. The maximum that can be permitted is 160,000 lb for a truck-tractor semi-trailer combination and 152,000 lb for specialised equipment, and permitted axle weights run to 20,000 lb on a single, 46,000 lb on a tandem group, 60,000 lb on a triple and 72,000 lb on a quadrum. A single-trip permit requires seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars of combined single limit automobile liability cover, against the three hundred thousand dollar indemnity bond Alabama asks for a comparable condition.

There is also a harvest allowance, and it is written the way every Missouri allowance is written. A vehicle or combination hauling grain or grain co-products during times of harvest may run up to ten per cent over the maximum weight limitation — but expressly not on the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways. That inversion has now turned up in ten states in a row: the state route is the loaded road and the interstate is the empty one, because Title 23 caps the Interstate System and no state can raise it.

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, with impoundment until the fines are paid also on the table. 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. Farm trucks and grain trucks off the Stoddard County bottoms. Log trucks and timber rigs off the forest edge. Dump trucks, aggregate haulers, day cabs, road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew. Across Stoddard County and Butler County this 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, or come to you and tow it. We can also 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.
• Is there a base here?Not in the town. The nearest researched site is a National Guard training area in the national forest, about eight miles off and over the Butler County line, and what it does was not established.
• It is a short combination rather than a full-length one.That suits this country. Missouri sets legal length by distance from its mapped highway systems, so out here a shorter rig is the one that can legally reach the yard.
• 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 Stoddard County and the ones around it, Butler County and Wayne County included. Distance has never stopped a sale.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup.

Beyond a season ending, 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 Stoddard County and Butler County there is usually one sitting.