Mailbox Fantasy

There is a mail box about a mile or so from me that is made from 1/4" plate, very well made, not a butcher job at all. The owner painted a red and white bulls eye target on it. I laughed the first time I saw it. I had to stop and inspect it. If I remember right Ernie made a metal mail box that looked indestructible.

Lane

My cousin was a rural mail carrier in Minnesota. Every winter a few mailboxes would get taken over by the snowplow. One fellow got tired of it and planted about a three foot section of (railroad) rail about six inches from the mailbox post. After one snowfall, the snowplow was seen limping back into town, the wing sort of dragging down alongside the truck...

Jerry

I noticed in rural Washington state in the mountains, most people hang their mailbox on chains from a long overhead pipe. If anything hits it, it just swings out of the way and back.

I'd

It is a sad commentary when a lawyer would suggest you had to make your property safe for vandals.

The cleverest idea I heard of was a box mounted on a swing arm so if smashed, the BF chunk of concrete on the other end of the arm would swing around and take out the back of the vandals car.

I had a neighbor who got sick and tired of replacing mailboxes/posts due to the township snowplows knocking them off every winter.

He worked for the local electric utility. For the post he brought home a rig and buried a utility pole 8 feet deep and plunked a mailbox on top at the proper height.

That winter the plow truck nailed it and lost. The township went after him for $8G in damages to the plow truck.

But they never hit the mail box ever again.

Maybe it was mike graham? I recall that a regular poster here did indeed produce a boilerplate mailbox (regular mailbox inside a double-sized one, with the intermediate space filled with concrete) which was then mounted on well casing which was in turn connected to either I-beam or steel train rails underground.

The town had been using a road grader as a plow, and when the blade hit the item, it sheared the bolts that held the blade on. Apparently the town was *not* happy and he wound up paying for it to be fixed.

Jim

In the areas I have lived in the sport is done with baseball bats. When they hit a mailbox welded up from half 6"steel pipe and half 6" steel channel, the litle B______ds vibrate all the way back to town. The box is mounted on a 3 ft. arm which pivots out of the way if hit by a grader or mower. Bugs

I have written about my experiences. After getting mine crunched, I bought a new shiny one, and built a liner inside it made out of 3/8" plate. Mounted it on a piece of pipe covered with boards. Tilted it a bit. It looked inviting to someone playing "mailbox baseball."

Within two weeks, I got a hit. Then the hits came only every one to two years when a new crop got their driver's licenses.

Steve

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 08:31:40 -0500, the inscrutable "Lucky Strike" spake:

Who won in court?

That's good.

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I got a bit of a chuckle out of that story when it was posted here. As I recall there was some heated discussions with the county/town/whatever and the tape measure showed that the owner WAS legal distance from the edge of the road and thus not at fault.

Cheers Trevor Jones

Can't remember where I saw it but one recommendation was to take a regular sized smaller mailbox, remove the door, and mount it inside one of the oversized mailboxes. The gap between got filled with concrete. From the outside, it looks like a normal and very inviting box to play baseball with. The vandals swing with all their might due to the normal expectations and get one hell of a painful surprise when the bat hits.

Koz

Sorry state of affairs when *you* have to pay for damages caused by

*their* bad driving. Would be like me going off the road and taking out your front porch - and then making *you* pay for the damages to my car.... I mean, like, what happens when the plow driver creams parked cars along the road, or takes out utility poles?..... Ken.

I have had my mailbox up for more than 25 years...I was talking to the mailman the other day and he said he remembered when it was new. Took a piece of tubing, 1/4" wall, cut it in half lengthwise and used tis for the rounded top. The ends, bottom, and sides are 1/4" plate,

18 nickel maraging steel. This is welded to a 4" concrete filled lally column, set in concrete. I used a commercial mailbox for a pattern, so it is "Stealth", and just to be a prick, I change its color every few years. The mail guy liked it so much he told the local harware store about it, and they wanted to sell them, till thye got legal advice not to. Every spring we pick up broken baseball bats...I never knew aluminum bats were filled with plastic, before!!!! One year, the little bastards tried using a crowbar. We heard him screaming when the bar hit the box and stung his hand. Looked at the box, saw a little tiny 60° groove where the hex bar hit the side. Never been sued. If they sue me, at least I will know who they are and where they live, and we'll take it from there at some point in the future...haha. BUT!! Last Fall, I went out to get the mail, closed the door, and the whole thing slowly fell over backwards, like a dying cow. The lally column rusted through all around at ground level and was bare concrete. They use too much salt on the roads around here, I guess. But that's an easy fix.

Everybody seems to love these stories. From bOINGbOING last year:

Initial post:

Follow up: Elijah

------ lives on a mail *carrier* route and has a mail slot in the door

Once while bicycling I saw the results of a most devious mailbox mounting.

The mailbox was mounted atop 4" or so square steel tube. But instead of sticking down deep into the ground, the tube was L-shaped, with the bottom of the L parallel to the roadway. When a kid in a pickup tried to drive over the post, the L pivoted, and his own momentum drove the bottom of the L up under his engine, skewering his truck in place.