Imperial Entanglements
(This one will be slightly less interesting for you Steel Soldiers, as most of you will already know all of this stuff, but I thought I would re-post it anyways, as a completionist... Thanks for bearing with me!)
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AKA - Getting Legal with The Man
Well, I've stalled long enough, time to cover the more boring, yet far more critical aspects of this project. The paperwork. In specific, getting the vehicle registered and legal with the man. Here is some back story.
"That's a great price on a 25 ton crane..."
First off, let's cover the process of simply buying one. The easiest way is to buy one off of Craigslist from a private individual. If you do this, you bypass a ton of paperwork, and have the Fast Path towards getting legal with The Man. If someone else has already gotten the **** thing registered, then all you have to do is a title transfer and pay some fees. A far simpler, basic, run-of-the-mill operation that will raise no eyebrows at the DMV and will usually just sail on through. Of course, you have to get really lucky and find just the vehicle you are looking for on Craigslist, which I could not when I went searching. Of course, I was impatient, and given more time - like a year or so - I am sure one would have popped up. So, okay, you want one right now, or at least soonish, and you decide you are going to buy one (semi)directly form the U.S. Military. Enter Government Liquidation! Basically you register for the site, then you are able to bid on the crap posted up there. And it is simply amazing what you can find on that site. I saw pallets of tons of scrap aluminum being sold for dollars, entire stacks of 647 heavy duty travel enclosures, pallets of old laptops with their HDD removed, twenty-ton fire trucks and more! Reigning myself in, I found that Nellis Airforce Base had three older M109A3s up for auction, and I found the one I wanted.
For those of you that don't know, the Military uses a classification system, Supply Condition Codes for its motor pool. It goes something like this: A vehicle rolls off the assembly line onto the show room floor (or perhaps parade ground in this case) it is considered a classification A1. The A means it is new, and the 1 means it is in the highest bracket of New. You put your first ding in it and it gets keyed in the parking lot, it becomes A2. You run over a small tree because you couldn't see the **** thing backing up, it becomes an A3, and so on. The one I was looking at was an F7. Now, before you groan too loudly, that was the best of the three up for auction. As a matter of fact, I am pretty certain that if they are in better shape, the Military has to keep them as they are serviceable. I don't know this for a fact, but it wouldn't surprise me if perfectly functional, but old vehicles get tagged as F7 and lower just to make room for new incoming stock.
You then bid on the item as normal - I did mine on the way to a meeting at work - and win just like on eBay. If you win, your credit card on file is charged, and then nominally are owed a truck. I say this because this is where they have to do a background check on you. This only happens for a few controlled items on Government Liquidators, but giant old army trucks are one of them. You have to fill out something called an EUC, or End User Certificate. Basically it is a bunch of rote questions asking you if you are a business, are you planning on reselling the vehicle, are you a US citizen, do you currently live in the country, are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party, and so on. That sort of thing. Being an odd classification of a Gun Toting Liberal, I was pretty sure I still qualified, even living in Santa Cruz, so I filled the **** thing out and sent it off to the good people at Battle Creek. I still have my official piece of paper from the impressive sounding Defense Logistics Agency. I knew I was in the Big Time now! Much to everyone's surprise, I checked out, and was awarded my EUC. It should be noted that this process takes up to 4 to 6 weeks for first time buyers, and during that time you are in the unenviable position of having shelled out for a vehicle you can not yet take possession of.
Now, there is great controversy over what type of license you need to drive one of these trucks. Especially in good 'ole California. After a lot of research, it basically looked like I was going to need at least a Class B license to drive one if it was the troop transport flatbed truck version of the vehicle. If it had a van body on it, and that van body had a bunk bed and other RV accouterments , it could be considered a Motor Home, and a Class C license (your standard car license) would do fine.
Everything hinges on the fact that it has three axles. Any vehicle over 6,000 lbs. with three axles needs a Class B license (and apparently there are Commercial and Non-Commercial Class B as well - ungh), and just as a reminder, the M109A3 weighs in at just under 15,500 lbs! Of course and Motor Home under 42' long only requires a Class C. After reading a whole lot of forum posts, and California Vehicle Codes, it looked like the Motor Home ruling took precedence over the three-axle rule. Another interesting fact - if it is not a Motor Home, the DMV wanted to register it as a commercial vehicle, and thus charge me registration by its weight, which would have been an additional thousand dollars or more! So, after having done my homework, I decided I was going to take the plunge and buy the thing.
Believe it or not, I had a giant truck show up in front of my house, get dropped off, and I had nothing else in the form of paper work besides a receipt from the trucking company, saying they had simply shipped something, and a few vague emails from Government Liquidation.
The Capitola DMV
Being who I am, I gathered up what few scraps of paperwork I had and marched down to my local DMV the very same day the truck had arrived. I waited through my lines, and eventually talked to a helpful DMV employee. After a bit, I had her thoroughly bamboozled, and when she went to the Old Timer with white hair to ask him what he thought (think of him as the DMV equivilent of the Old Sensei on the Mountain) and he still didn't know, I knew I was doing good. At a loss of what to do, she simply took $20 from me as a "Miscellaneous Charge" and issued me a Temp Permit for the next two months. She had mentioned that the computer kept asking about something called a "SF-97" form that the Goverment was apparently supposed to give me. I thanked her for her time, grabbed my temp permit before she changed her mind, and headed back home.
At this point I started to do some serious research on Steel Soldiers, quite simply the best single resource for anyone interested in owning a Military Vehicle from the US. After some searching through other registration forum threads, I discovered that apparently I should have been issued an entire separate set of paperwork with my vehicle, including the coveted "SF-97" form. Calling Goverment Liquidators, I found they were extremely helpful, and pointed me to the section of their web site that now contained my application for the form. It was a little tricky, in that the link will not show up until you have actually won a bid apparently, so even though I had looked there before, I hadn't seen it. Oh well, I know now. Filling it out, and giving them some more money (apparently it was free before, but now they charge you), I sent it off to them. Now you wait another few weeks to get back the paperwork.
You may ask yourself, "Hey wait a minute, this sounds like this would take months... Don't you still have a giant, 7 1/2 ton unregistered military truck sitting in front of your house?" Well, the answer is, yes. Yes I do. This was not a fact that was lost on me, and as a result I didn't really drive her anywhere around town (except to sneak out to ProBuild to buy the floors - no other vehicle of mine would fit the plywood!) for fear of being pulled over. It helped I had the temporary permit, and I had gotten my insurance to sign off on the vehicle, but until I could prove it was a motor home, I didn't want to take my chances. What I did spend my time w doing was fixing up the truck, getting it to the point where when I did have my paperwork, I could drive the sucker down to the DMV and show them the bunk bed and so on.
Well, I got the SF-97 Form back, along with a freshly printed Nevada title, so I marched on down to the DMV for my second attempt. At this point in the timeline I wasn't quite done getting the bunk beds in, and had only just painted the interior of the van body. After waiting in line, I spoke with another fine DMV employee who basically told me "Go forth and make it look like an RV, and come back when you are ready". Otherwise, Commercial Vehicle, thousands of extra dollars in registration, and I would need a new classification of license. Flash forward to me working my ass off, getting the bunk bed purchased and installed, and then I crossed my fingers, hopped in the truck, and drove it across town to the DMV.
You know what they say, the third time is a charm. I pulled into the little vehicle inspection area and pressed the little buzzer they give you. Horrible flashbacks to when I was 15 and took the driving test - right there at that exact same DMV - ran through my head. There was some hipster girl on a beat up Japanese moped in front of me, and she and the DMV Inspector had a serious screw-you rivalry going on between them. I swear she shot daggers out of her eyes at his turned back, and he crawled all over and under that poor little 50 lbs. scooter looking for anything that could be out of place. By the time he got to me I was seriously nervous. Nothing for it though, so I put on my best Number One Smile, and greeted him. He accepted the VIN on my dash plate just fine, and didn't try to crawl under the vehicle or engine looking for it anywhere else. Upon opening up the back, he grunted and said "You haven't gotten very far", which was fair I guess, as I had just bolted in the bunk bed, but it still hurt. He grumble/mumbled something, handed me some paperwork, and sent me inside.
Sitting inside, I waited back through line, then spoke with a helpful DMV employee. I got really lucky, and got the original woman I had spoken to on Trip #1, the nice one who had issued me the 2 month temp permit. She looked over my paperwork, smiling and nodding, and I started to feel hopeful. Then her brows knitted together, and I started worrying again. She stood up and went back to speak to the white haired Sensei On The Mounatin. Upon returning, I asked her what was up. She said, "I don't know what was up with Fred (insert random name here), our inspector. This vehicle inspection has been marked as a 'Truck with Camper Shell', which it clearly isn't. I asked Sifu what to do, and he said to just mark it down as a Motor Home". I practically cried with joy at those words.
It's like a birth certificate, only bigger, and made of metal...
I paid about a hundred more dollars, as opposed to over $1,100 more, got my new plates and stickers and registration, and I was done. I couldn't believe it. The deed had been done, I was legal with the man. I think I kissed those plates about a dozen times after getting them, and for the whole day I had that kind of inner glow you get after something big has happened in your life, like your first child is born. And, in a way, it had been...