We buy trucks in Orting

Two operations are attached to Orting in the node list. The King Creek Pit works construction sand and gravel with 23 employees — the second-largest crew at any gate in this lane — and a traprock quarry runs 9, filed here from 8.31 miles away by the address on its registration rather than by position.

Twenty-three people on a sand and gravel operation is a fixed plant running steadily, not an outfit chasing jobs. It means the same roads, the same trucks, week after week.

Traprock and gravel are two different loads out of two different gates: one hard rock that grosses out before the box looks full, the other bulkier and lighter. Both go in open-topped tandems and tri-axles, and both meet the same crossings.

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

Those crossings have been measured, and one of them repays a careful read. Within ten miles of the quarry the federal bridge inventory records 48 structures, 5 posted for load and 5 coded below legal loads, the nearest 7.58 miles out. Four are county-maintained and one is the state’s.

The lowest raw rating among the five is 6.5 metric tonnes. An empty tandem dump weighs about 11.0, so that structure does not take a commercial truck in any state of load — not part-loaded, not empty. It is not a cap, it is a closed door.

The tightest one a truck can actually use rates 14.5 metric tonnes, about 16.0 US tons, and carries Groe Road East 7.91 miles from the gate. Over that 11.0-tonne tare it admits roughly 3.5 tonnes of stone — a thin load on a long-ish haul.

Read that 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 crossings are the local ceiling, and one of them is a wall. The statute above them 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.

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

Box trucks and straight trucks are not a Pierce 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 King Creek Pit and the quarry 8.31 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.
• It has run part-loaded for years because of the bridges. Does that hurt it?It shows as low miles against high hours, and that is how we read it rather than as a truck that has been standing. Give us both numbers.
• Do you come out to Pierce County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the King Creek Pit included, and the county roads with five restrictions on them. 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 job that finished and did not get replaced. A truck sitting behind a shop since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Around Pierce County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them having hauled off the King Creek Pit or the quarry 8.31 miles out.

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.