We buy trucks in Forks

One operation is attached to Forks in the node list: a crushed-stone pit running 3 employees, 1.58 miles from the centroid. Small crew, short haul, and it is genuinely here rather than filed here from somewhere else.

This is timber country and the truck population reflects it more than one stone pit does — log trucks and timber rigs off the woods roads, flatbeds, and the tandems that keep those roads passable.

The pit matters because rock is what a logging road is made of. When the surfacing goes on, it comes off a gate like this one on the same few miles of public road every time.

MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System; the node list at docs/nodes/node-list.json. The distance is straight-line to the place centroid, not a drive.

Those few miles have been measured. Within ten miles of the pit the federal bridge inventory records 25 structures, 2 posted for load and 2 coded below legal loads, the nearest 2.34 miles out.

Both are county-maintained, which is Washington’s usual arrangement: statewide a county bridge is coded below legal loads at 15.6% against 2.1% for a state one, so the county tier is where the restrictions live.

The tightest rates 23.0 metric tonnes, about 25.4 US tons, and carries Quillayute Road 2.34 miles from the gate. Over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump that admits roughly 12.0 tonnes of stone — a part load, but a generous one by the standards of this lane.

Read it as an upper bound. It is a minimum inside a ten-mile circle, and at 64.1% of nodes measured this way something tighter lies between ten miles and twenty.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Washington file, items 41, 64 and 70; docs/nodes/FINDING-radius-sensitivity.md for the radius figure.

Those two crossings are the local limit. The statute above them gives no single figure either.

Washington’s maximum gross is 105,500 lb. The statute bars more than 20,000 lb on any single axle, and lets two consecutive sets of tandem axles carry 34,000 lb each where the first and last axle sit 36 feet or more apart, with the groups in between governed by the bridge formula.

Then it opens up again. The department of transportation by rule for state highways, and a local authority for a road under its own jurisdiction, may extend that table to 115,000 lb. So the operative figure is an administrative rule or a local ordinance rather than anything printed in the code, and no page can honestly hand you one number. Whether the 105,500 survives on the interstate is not established by the files behind this page, and we are not going to guess at it.

Seasonal limits work the same way, and Washington writes down something most states leave implied. A local authority may restrict a road that rain, snow or thaw would seriously damage — and the ordinance is not effective unless and until the signs are up and being maintained. The sign is the rule. Which roads are posted in a given week is not in any file we hold.

RCW 46.44.041 on axle loads and the extension to 115,000 lb, and RCW 46.44.080 on local seasonal restrictions. Information, not legal advice.

Past the roads and the loads, the paperwork is that one sentence.

Everything after it is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither of those stops a sale.

One Washington duty has a clock on it where most states’ have none, and it is the one to know about if a truck has been written off. Where a vehicle is destroyed or declared a total loss, the owner — or the insurer, once it has settled — has fifteen days to report it to the department and surrender the title. The statute names the fifteen days itself, which is unusual.

RCW 46.12.600. Information, not legal advice.

None of that narrows what we will look at. Log trucks and timber rigs, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, service bodies, box trucks and straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not a Clallam County thing in particular — they are everywhere. They are on the list because we buy them here too.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. The pit 1.58 miles out and the woods roads beyond it are where most of them turn up.

• 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.
• 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. If it was ever declared a total loss, the fifteen-day reporting duty is the department’s, not a bar on selling it.
• It has run log work off gravel roads its whole life. Does that hurt?No. Tell us what it pulled and roughly how long it did it — a frame and a driveline that have been worked hard on rough surfacing is a fact about the truck, and we would rather know it than find it.
• Do you come out to Clallam County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the pit 1.58 miles out included, and the woods roads past it. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you drive it to us.

Those questions come up because the reasons for selling are mostly personal. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A woods contract that finished. A truck sitting behind a shed since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across Clallam County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them working out of a gate 1.58 miles from town and a good deal further into the timber.

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.