Mail Box

[Bird]

Yep, Pat, I've seen a number of communities where everyone has mailboxes like mine, and there are quite a few within a half mile of my house, but for reasons unknown to me, mine is the only one of that type on this street. My youngest daughter just bought a big house in a fairly new addition in far north Ft. Worth and all the mailboxes there are very similar to mine except mine is located straight in front of the house, about the middle of the lot while in my daughter's new neighborhood, they are on the property line with two mailboxes in each brick pedestal. Of course I think all the houses in her neighborhood are being built by the same builder while that's not the case in my neighborhood.

[Pat]

If anyone is interested (or not) I started putting dirt in place to make a safe place wide enough for the letter carrier to get off the state highway. So far so good. I may put more on later after the first effort settles some. I may have to have a safety person stand by to watch for traffic as it is hard to get at the project without getting the tractor over the white line at the shoulder onto the highway.

After the dirt is settled and packed some more I will gravel it with crusher run limestone with all the fines left in and then put in a cantilevered mailbox holder. I will put in a vertical pipe well back from the intended mailbox location and then a horizontal pipe out from that for the box to set on. I do not use concrete and the finished product can be pivoted rather easily. If the box but not the vertical pipe is hit, the whole structure will just pivot out of the way.

I did this for my personal box nearly 7 years ago and it is still standing just fine. I have pivoted it out of the way a few times to allow me to tractor around it and it is not too hard to rotate but the strongest winds have not budged it. Even the recent storm that blew both of the overhead doors (14x14 feet) off my metal shop bld did not turn my mailbox.

Pat

[CJDave]

[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] I made a similar setup for a customer waaaay back when I had the machine shop and portable repair trucks. We set a post of heavy 4" OD. pipe well back from the road. Over that we slipped a piece of 4" I.D. pipe that had a top cap welded on it. The outer pipe had a detent cut into the lower edge and that detent found a home on a round pin welded into the pipe that was set into the ground. If it was pushed, the outer pipe and the attached cntilevered arm that held the box could rise slightly; aided by the greased surface between the two pipes and get off the pin and rotate out of the way. We even put a grease cup in two places with conventional grease zerks alongside. [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img]

[Pat]

Dave, WHAT??? No gold leaf? No filigree? No art deco cherubs?

I didn't even use telescopic pipes, just left the concrete out of the equation.

Nice idea though. It is quite like the spray arms on my pasture sprayer. They hit something and jump out of a detent and swing back and up out of the way.

If you put a plug on the inside pipe then a single Zerk on top of the cap on the outside pipe should lube the whole thing. I would need a fairly positive detent due to wind. The mail carrier would not be pleased to have to get out and scramble down the embankment to put the mail in or to move the box. Probably just not deliver the mail in case the wind moved the box.

One could cut the bearing surface on the bias to preload the thing by gravity to rest in the detent but to rise if pushed out of the detent in either direction. That way when the wind gust finished, the assy would return to its default detent position by gravity and likewise if it were hit.

Pat

[jml755]

Pat,Dave,
When I read your posts, it reminded me of a piece of equipment we built for an auto assy plant some time ago. We employed the same type of pipe-on-pipe method described and tried the biased cut on the outside pipe for an "auto-return" feature. Too much friction with the pin. Ended up with a cam-follower instead of the pin. Don't recall the angle of the cut for a smooth, non-lethal return function. May have even added bearings to the pipes, can't recall for sure. Worked slick.

[CJDave]

[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] I used to have a spray boom that was made with a pipe-in-pipe swing joint with the bearing surface on a bias. It had a spring inside that gave it the necessary return effort. It was a slick setup. We also had a pipe-in-pipe swing joint that we made by capping the internal pipe and adding a handful of ball bearings on top of the cap slathered in grease. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]