Dead mailbox
Got baseball batted on friday night/sat AM.
We like the old wood box/wood post look but this is getting ludicrous, people. I’m thinking of either getting one of the 1/4″ thick steel boxes, or making my own out of cast iron. The sprung steel mailbox post might be a good addition as well.
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Buy a slightly smaller mailbox that will fit inside your mailbox. Fill the smaller one with cement. Insert into your mailbox on weekend nights.
Try not to smile as you drift off to sleep that night.
I think I have some 3/8 inch thick 4″ pipe around here.
We’ll cut a section out and weld a back and a door on it.
That’ll fix ’em.
lol. I been thinking.
I remember a guy talking in a barber shop about somebody running down the mailbox posts on his street.
So he sunk a steel pipe, filled it with concrete and clad it with a hollowed post.
He said the sound woke him up.
And there was the fender in his front yard.
any of the above mailboxes on a bearing swivel, counter-weighted on the back to break the rear window of mom’s car.
One of out local JP’s had his mail box destroyed so many times, he had one built from 3/8″ steel and welded to a 6″ thick walled steel pipe.
His only task after that was resetting the pipe on occasion, after people totaled their vehicles on it. As I recall, he used his 4×4 truck and a chain to pull it upright while someone shoveled dirt in around it.
Steven’s idea resembles the old medieval jousting quintain.
I second the motion of building a USPS compliant mailbox, out of at least 1/4″ plate, and preferably 3/8″, for that extra measure of bell-ringing-goodness.
Same for the concrete filled, heavy steel pipe post, sunk as deeply as available equipment might allow.
What’s not mentioned here, and must be done, is to install a well camoflauged game camera or other video surveilence, so that we all might, along with you, enjoy the fruits of these labors.
My other thought was to get ‘hold of Joe Huffman and concoct a mailbox full of Boomerite, but that’d end up being more trouble than it’s worth…. fun for one, brienf, (very) shining moment, anyway!
Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX
4in. Steel I – beam and 1/4 in steel box. Nice collection of broken and bent bats. Love to imagine the look on faces at the moment of impact. Saftey glass on occasion. Icing on the cake.
Don’t forget to cover any visible steel parts with a piece of wood veneer, heh, heh, heh.
There’ a new one in my town embedded in a tractor tire. Even the snowplows are leery of that one!
My brother used to have this problem. He resolved it by planting a piece of 10 inch drill stem about 6 feet deep into concrete, then slipped a piece of PVC pipe over it as camo, and set his (sacrificial)mailbox on top of it. A few nights later he heard a commotion and went out to find a Ford pickup with three confounded and inebriated teens impaled on the pole, which was sticking up through the cab after unhinging the engine from the motor mounts.
Dad had his mailbox batted.
Dad is a retired Army Engineer.
Concrete, I-beam, welding, and redwood camouflage went into the replacement.
Found a splintered bat one morning.
Word spread.
No more problems.
Like the counter weight idea. They whack it and some thing whacks them.
Steel post are the shazam when it comes to mail boxes.
My Dad built a mailbox once, from some scrap 3/4″ steel. I very much doubt you could do a lot of damage to it with less than a full stick of dynamite.
Whups. That was 1/2″ steel. Still.
I think I read somewhere that “Big Mailbox” lobbied the Obama administration and these kids are being paid with stimulus dollars. So, quit complaining and get a new mailbox or you will be labeled un-American by DHS.
My Dad’s was a 55 gallon drum filled with concrete that came w/ the house. We think it was a counter weight for something during the construction because they had already run 1/4″ thick by 2″ angle iron through it near the top, which was great for bolting that 4×4 for holding the box(and to bring it up to the height that the rural postal driver wanted). Oh and I had to paint it red, didn’t want anyone to say they couldn’t see it. As a matter of fact… I don’t think its moved since we got it up to the street :-)
When my Dad built our first house, oh so many years ago we lived on a gravel road at the edge of town. Kids still like to run his mailbox over. He took a couple of 2×12 planks placed boulders the size of bowling balls on each side of the 4×4 post he stuck in the middle..
Apparently running into it caused the boulders to bounce around underneath vehicle and cause damage, lots of oil all over the place.No more problems…hmm.
Sorry to be late for the party, but I was away a couple days and just HAVE to share this. My old GF’s Dad used to put a little fall display on his front yard, pumpkins, corn stalk, hay bale, that kinda thing. Kids would run across his yard and kick the pumpkins, just to be little turds, so he buys one of those plastic trick-or-treat pumpkins, fills it with concrete, sticks a pumpkin stem in the top. Thing musta weight ten pounds if it was an ounce. When it hardened he painted it orange and put it on the lawn.
Yeah, the kid screamed.
The Semi-Sweety had this problem, and set a large piece of steel pipe in concrete for her mailbox standard, but then put an ordinary flimsy aluminum mailbox on top. I recommended one of the steel plate ones, but she was not willing to spring for it. I suggested an outer tube for the stanchion, and an inner tube holding the box, with an helical interface between them, so that gravity would rotate the box back to its proper position after a bat hit, but she was not up for that either.
P.s. I do tend to go for the engineering solution, rather than the social one. The Semi-Sweety determined that it wasn’t rowdy youfs, but careless drivers of Waste Management, Inc. trucks who had demolished her mailbox. She got on the phone with those yahoos and yelled and screamed at them, and sure enough, they were right delicate with their garbage trucks for a while after that.
If you haven’t been yelled and screamed at by the Semi-Sweety, you don’t know what yelling and screaming is. There is a reason why I refer to her house as Castle Bravo.
Oh, I do still love her very much, from 600 miles away.