We buy trucks in Oak Harbor

Two operations are attached to Oak Harbor in the node list. One is a naval seaplane base 1.25 miles from the centroid; the other is a sand and gravel pit run by the county itself, with 5 employees.

A county-run pit is a particular thing. What comes out of it goes into county roads, so the haul is public works rather than commercial supply, and the equipment doing it is the equipment a public works yard keeps: tandems, service bodies, a low-boy, and the pickups that go with a crew.

The base row is one of four on this island filed under three different place labels, and only one of the four names says what command it belongs to. Nothing groups them in the record — no shared word, no shared town, no shared code — so a count of rows here describes the file rather than the ground.

The installation sidecar under docs/facts/node/; MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System. The distance is straight-line to the place centroid, not a drive.

Whatever those two gates put on island roads, the ceiling is a statute question and the statute gives no single figure.

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.

Beyond the load rules, 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, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, service bodies, tankers, box trucks and straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not an Island 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 base 1.25 miles out and the county pit 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 came out of a public works fleet. Anything different about that?Not for us, and those are often well-kept trucks with real service records behind them. Bring whatever paperwork came with it and we’ll take it from there.
• Do you come out to Island County?Yes. Being on an island is not a reason we would not — the base 1.25 miles out and the county pit included. 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 contract on the base that finished, or a fleet truck reaching the end of its cycle. A truck sitting behind a shed since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Around Island County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, whether they worked the base 1.25 miles out or the county pit down the road.

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.