Attached is a picture of a mail box based on a water filled tire.
For those having problem with mailboxes being pushed over I have hear this type of design is an excellent deterrent and may even insure the miscreants leave their vehicle at the site. [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]
Egon [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]
Egon, love the design. Only thing I would add is place a piece of steel tubing as a liner in the box and weld it to the upright. If someone hits the box with a baseball bat, their hands will sting for a few days. [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
I had several ideas for mail boxes that would not only defy typical vandals but give a little back. I have since had it explained to me that all mailboxes mounted in the public right of way (aren't they all?) must be breakaway design so as to not unduly impede a vehicle running over it and cause injury to the driver or a passenger. Now that sucks!
I'm still thinking about that. Wondering if high mass but easily sheared upright will satisfy BOTH requirements. High mass to sting the wielder of the bat but easily sheared upright column so as to not stop a car and injure anyone inside. So far most vandals hit the boxes with a bat or club and don't drive over them.
I recall a guy a couple years ahead of me in high school using his dad's work car (his dad was my dad's boss) and the handy tow chain in the trunk to try to pull someone's mailbox down. He yanked the one half of the back bumper off of the otherwise nice Chevy's rear end and told his dad he caught it on a dumpster in a parking lot.
My current box will be replaced soon. the idiot who shot it full of holes committed suicide a while back so it is safe to put up a nice big new one. It has never been disturbed except for the one shooting incident. I have it cantilevered out from a post set well back from the edge of the gravel road. The grader man would have to really go astray to hit the post. I used no concrete to set the post so if anyone did hit the box it swivels (the pipe turns easily but not easy enough for the wind to blow it around.)
Flight of fancy... I'm not having mailbox problems now but thought of this system:
#1. Erect a large disk concrete monolith in the shape of a disk standing on edge. The front surface is concave, actually a parabola like a satellite dish and painted with some interesting artwork such as the great seal of the US or Oklahoma or...
An explosive device is mounted in front about like where the LNB is on a sat dish hidden in the light that illuminates the art work at night but seems to be burned out. The concrete reflector is aimed where a car would be if someone were driving by hitting the box with a bat. An accelerometer mounted to the box triggers the ignition signal for the explosive.
Bad guys drive by and hit the box a whack with the bat, exceeding the threshold G force and firing the explosive charge. The shockwave is focused by the shape of the concrete dish to a point about 2-3 feet farther away than the mailbox. The focused concentrated shock wave blows out any rolled up windows in the car or the windshield if the reflector is positioned for that purpose.. It likely makes quite an impression on the occupants of the car as well, disorienting them etc.
The technology for the above is trivial and not too pricey.
#2. With more $ to spend an EMP generator could be used to good effect (EMP = ElectroMagnetic Pulse) This would burn out the microelectronics in the car, things like the engine control computer, and bring it to a halt with needs of expensive component replacement but would itself probably go unnoticed as contrary to all the SCIFI applications it does not glow in the dark or make scary sounding "power noises" like crescendoing whines and such.
Gee, dad, we were just driving, not doing nuttin', HONEST, and suddenly your Beemer just melted down.
It gets wilder and crazier from here...
Pat
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
Pat, the different designs and installations of mailboxes are interesting. Out in the country in Texas, it depends on what kind of road you are on. If it's a state road, which includes farm-to-market roads, you buy the box, the state sends a guy out to install the breakaway post with a reflector. At least in our area, if you buy the box and leave it on the ground out front, the state guy would mount it on the post for you. Otherwise, you could mount it yourself after he set the post in place. That's the kind my brother had.
But if you were on a county road or private road, paved or not, the only guy you had to satisfy was your mail carrier. I bought a place that had a heavy steel post set in concrete, and flat steel plate on top of the post and two mailboxes on that; mine and one for the "next door neighbor" if there had been one.
But my wife's brother had bought an "undeveloped" 10 acres on an unpaved county road, so he set his mailbox, apparently similar to what you mentioned. It was cantilevered on a post that was set all the way back across the borrow ditch so if anything hit it, it would swing out of the way.
And fortunately, none of us ever had any damage done to our mailboxes.
In town, some older neighborhoods still have mail carriers walking and putting the mail in mailboxes mounted on the walls of homes next to the front door, and that's what we had at the new house we had built in town in 1972. However, when we had another new one built in town in 1977, everyone in that area had to have their mailboxes on posts at the curb and at the property line so your box and the neibhbor's box were together so the mail carrier took care of two boxes with one stop. Now, for the past 15 years or so in that part of Dallas, the Post Office puts up a single post at the curb, in the middle of the block, with enough boxes for the entire city block. Some "blocks" are longer than others, so some people have a pretty good walk to their mailbox.
And in the town I live in, you have to have a box out at the edge of the street, as you do out in the country, but apparently there aren't much other rules. [img]/forums/images/icons/laugh.gif[/img] Mine is in the center of the lot and the box is in a 2' square brick pedestal. There are quite a few similar ones in the neighborhood, but for reasons unknown mine is the only one of that type on my street. Some have wooden posts, some have steel posts, some have "fancy" boxes, some have plain ones. The only thing they have in common is that the mail carrier can drive up to them and deliver the mail without getting out of his vehicle.
I have rerouted the driveway of a rental house and had to get state approval for the driveway connecting to a state highway. The state specifies the radius of curvature where the driveway fans out and contacts the roadside, how far from the property line, type, size, shape, and installation method of the culvert (tin horn) B U T...
I forgot to include a mailbox in the design and although I satisfied the state I didn't satisfy the post office. Now I have to add dirt to partially fill the BIG ditch beside the road so the mail carrier has room to pull off the road to put mail in the box I will install. I hope to be able to do it without extending the tin horn which would be a hassle and expense since it is highly tapered at the end (state requirement so a car driving off the road will not hit it hard but will glide over it.) So a few dump trailer loads (6+yds per load) of dirt and a 10 wheeler of gravel (for first coat and more later when it settles in) and I should be able to get mail delivered there. Meanwhile the tenant has a 6 mo lease on a box at the post office.
I am not happy with the thought of going back to the state regarding the change and am considering just doing it. My argument is that as is it is approved, even above and beyond their requirements. What I am going to be doing remains above and beyond their minimums. If they don't like the finished product they only have to tell me. It is unlikely that anyone will ever notice or care plus I could have done it in the first place and it would have been fine.
Pat
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
Pat,Bird,
I also had heard that you can't build anything that could injure someone. But Bird's design doesn't prevent the car from running over the mailbox.. .....Might mess up the undercarriage a little, heh,heh,heh.
Bird,
I've seen a lot of the square brick pedestals like yours along the roadside (where the brickwork matches the house) up here in Michigan. A new twist on this is the County Road Commissions are cracking down as they are in the Right-of-Way, which the county owns. County says you can't "build" anything in the ROW as the County would be liable (and get sued) if somebody hit it. Not sure about the latest on that. Amazing how the system works against the honest homeowner and protects the drunk driving down the road who wanders onto the shoulder or the kid who want to smash someone's mailbox for no good reason.
In the past, around this time of year, a lot of cases of mailboxes "blowing up" happened. Kids mix some household chemicals in a plastic pop bottle and stick them in mailboxes. Gas builds up and kapow!!! Few years ago, they found that one of the local school's chemistry books had an experiment about it. The timing on that chapter co-incided with a lot of incidents. Surprise, surprise!!
I've seen some designs based on a car coil spring mounted to a pad, Kind of like the kid's rocking horse at a playground. Post springs back up, again, after scraping along the bottom of the car.
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A new twist on this is the County Road Commissions are cracking down as they are in the Right-of-Way, which the county owns.
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I'll bet a lot of people in this area have never looked at their deed or survey closely enough to realize that the city owns about 15' of all our front yards. There is a 50' easement for the road and we have a 20' wide asphalt street with no curbs or sidewalks. The city sewer line runs along my side of the street while the water main is on the other side. So, according to my measurements, the city could (although I'm confident they never will) take 15' feet of my front yard, every mailbox on both sides of the street, and even my live oak tree if they wanted to widen the street.
Of course, it's a little easier to understand the concern about drunks hitting stuff alongside the road on country roads, especially where there are 55 or more mph speed limits. But here, there's a 4-way stop sign 5 houses south of us (the only cross street our street has), a long block north to a street that turns west, and a short half block or so to the dead end, and a 30 mph speed limit. And it would be a rare thing indeed for us to have anyone on our street exceed that speed limit.
A tip over mail box holder design.
Egon [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]
[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] Bird, you are so right about the easement thing. When I was managing a water supply company we got a contract to install about three miles of large diamenter pipe alongside a county road. The pipeline alignment went right through the front yard of several residences that were along the right-of-way and within the easement. It took some real slick diplomacy on my part to assuage homeowners whose lawn, flower beds, sidewalks; and sometimes their favorite shrub; went into the spoil pile. LUCKILY, I knew that the underground water in that area had a high BORON content, and Boron toxicity is a real problem for trees and landscaping. So with that in mind I took each homeowner aside and told them in the "strictest confidence" that I would have the crew install a "secret faucet" that they could use instead of their existing well for landscape watering and not even have to pay the Irrigation Water District for the water. So when the time came for the 30" wheel trencher to come ripping through their front lawn, they all had kind of a smug expression, even as they watched remnants of their rose bushes come off the end of the cross conveyor. [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
CJDave
"and even my live oak tree if they wanted to widen the street."
That is a sore subject here in Michigan. Our township (and many other suburbs) have tree and sidewalk ordinances. You MUST have a sidwalk across the front of your lot (unless your house was built before the ordinance was enacted) and you (or the sub developer) MUST plant a tree between the sidewalk and the street in the ROW.
Now we have a huge problem with the Emerald Ash Borer (import from Asia) that is killing 99% of the Ash trees which was the prevalent tree planted in these ROWs. The local government will bear the cost of removal for diseased trees in the ROW, but the homeowner must plant another one at his/her expense. Another issue is that the tree roots heave the sidewalks over time. Then the city/township comes along and replaces the sidewalk sections that are cracked, billing the homeowner for the job.
The illogic of this is astounding. They make you put 2 things in close proximity (trees & sidewalks) that they KNOW will create a problem over time and cost the homeowner money.
You are right though, Bird, most people don't realize the extent of the city's jurisdiction over their property.
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