We buy trucks in Friday Harbor

Three operations are attached to Friday Harbor in the node list and all three are stone. Lawson Quarry Inc runs 3 employees on construction sand and gravel. Sea Island Quarry runs 2 on crushed stone, 8.92 miles from the town centroid. Dolphin Bay Quarry runs 2 on dimension traprock, 9.6 miles out, carried under MSHA ID 4503251 with Dolphin Bay Quarry Inc as operator of record.

Dimension stone is not the same trade as crushed. It goes out in blocks and slabs on flatbeds rather than loose in a tandem, and it is heavy for its size. Three small gates, two kinds of load, one island.

The host rock at the crushed-stone pit is granite, so this is the quartz-bearing side of the federal silica rule rather than the carbonate side — a property of the material, not a measurement anyone took at these sites.

And the road off the island is a boat. That changes the shape of a truck sale more than anything else on this page.

MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System; the node list at docs/nodes/node-list.json. Distances are straight-line to the place centroid, not drives.

That boat turns up in the bridge record too, which is not something we expected to write. Within ten miles of the crushed-stone pit the federal inventory holds just 13 structures — the circle is cut off by salt water on every side, so thirteen is a bound on the island’s own roads and says nothing about the mainland.

Four of the thirteen are coded below legal loads. That is 30.8%, and it is the highest rate at any node in its batch. None of the four is county-maintained: San Juan County maintains four bridges and posts none of them, so every restriction here is the state’s.

The tightest of them rates 20.0 metric tonnes, about 22.0 US tons, and it carries ferry traffic 4.27 miles out. Over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump that admits roughly 9.0 tonnes of stone. The commercial floor on this island is set by a ferry terminal approach, which is about as literal as geography gets.

Read it as an upper bound. It is the minimum inside a ten-mile circle, and at 64.1% of the nodes measured this way something tighter sits 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 are the local ceilings. The general one is a statute, and it does not resolve to a number.

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 what may run on them, 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. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers, flatbeds and day cabs, rollbacks and service bodies, road tractors, box trucks and straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not a San Juan 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 three quarries and the ferry lane 4.27 miles out 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.
• Do I have to get it onto a ferry?No. Out here that is the common case rather than the exception: we buy plenty of trucks remotely and arrange the tow ourselves, and the crossing is ours to sort out. If it is easier for you to bring it across, that works too.
• Do you come out to San Juan County?Yes — out to the pits at 8.92 miles and 9.6 miles and anywhere else on the island. Being across the water is not a reason we would not, and where a visit is not the sensible way to do it the remote purchase is a real option rather than a consolation. 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 quarry 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 San Juan County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, and the 4.27 miles to the ferry is the only part that is different from anywhere else.

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.