We buy trucks in Bolingbrook

Two crushed-stone operations sit here on the federal mine register — the Barbers Corner Quarry at 20 employees and a second at one. One employee does not establish what a site is doing, and Illinois publishes no per-site aggregate register to check it against, so the second is recorded and not built on.

There is also a mill. Bay State Milling is the largest privately held family-owned miller in the United States and the fourth-largest flour producer in the country, and its Bolingbrook facility makes gluten-free grains, flours and edible seed blends — palletised and bagged product rather than the pneumatic bulk output of a commodity wheat mill. The company-wide capacity figure is not attributable to this site.

That difference in what comes out of the door is the whole point. A mill turning out palletised bags loads vans and flatbeds on pallets; a quarry at Barbers Corner loads dump bodies with stone. Two industries in one Will County town, and almost no overlap in the equipment.

It is a useful reminder that a commodity code does not tell you what kind of truck is at the gate. The product form does, and here the two forms could hardly be further apart.

So dump trucks work the stone side while vans and flatbeds work the mill, across Will County. That is a fact about Bay State Milling and the Barbers Corner Quarry, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Day cabs, box trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere and are bought on exactly the same terms.

Most of the reasons people sell aren’t happy ones, 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.

Those loads all run under one set of numbers. Illinois statute 625 ILCS 5/15-111 sets 80,000 pounds gross for five or more axles, 20,000 pounds on a single axle and 34,000 pounds on a tandem, with no axle inside that tandem over 20,000 pounds, and a formula for consecutive axle groups that varies with spacing.

Local authorities and cities over 50,000 people may set their own weight limits by ordinance, but the same statute stops them exceeding the state maximums. So an Illinois local limit can only ever be lower than the state figure, never higher — which is worth knowing before you plan a route on the state number alone.

That section carries no seasonal frost provisions and no harvest or agricultural exemptions. That is scoped to that section of the statute and is not a claim that Illinois has no seasonal restriction anywhere, which we did not check.

One more number from the same code decides whether a title gets branded. Under 625 ILCS 5/3-117.1(b)(1) a vehicle is salvage once an insurance company pays a total loss claim on it, with two carve-outs: hail damage alone, where it does not affect operational safety, and any vehicle nine model years of age or older, which the registered owner may keep by agreement with the insurer. That second one is a right to ask rather than something the law does on its own. Subsection (b)(1.1) sets a separate test for self-insured companies — salvage where the repair cost, labour included, would come to more than 70% of what the vehicle was worth undamaged.