Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Jan/Feb issue of PB

Found out according to USPS specs that steel mailbox posts aren't "legal" but that anything else can be used for a mailbox post. We are exploring aluminum and other material options. He works for the railroad; he said he has some beefy options available.

We also could use a railroad tie for each mailbox too........ He has access to brand new ones.....

I know we are hijacking this thread, but...

We lived in a rural short-life mailbox area for a number of years. One of the high school teachers (a local boy) where our sons attended, was arrested and fired for taking several students bowling and drinking. When they finished bowling, they used baseball bats from his car to destroy a lot of mailboxes in our farming community.

I have no idea how many mail boxes we replaced over about 15 years. Baseball bats were the weapon of choice. But big 4WD
vehicles were not far behind. They enjoyed driving up to a mailbox or backing over the mailbox. We found a few of our rumpled and scraped-up mailboxes a few hundred feed/yards down the road that got stuck under these vehicles

After the teacher incident mentioned above I welded 3/8-inch rebar hoops into a 1/4-inch thick plate. It kind of looked like the bed for a covered wagon. I found a large (package size) rugged rubber USPS approved mail box that I drilled for easy mounting onto the plate mentioned above. The mailbox was made from rubber much like the freeze-proof water bowls/buckets for critters ranging from sled dogs to horses.

I had some old utility poles out behind the barn. I cut off about the bottom 8 feet of one of them. I used the post hole digger on my tractor to drill down as far as possible (36-40 inches). I poured a full bag of Sakrete into the bottom of the hole. The pole was plumbed using a few more bags of Sakrete. The remainder of the hole, about 6-inches from the ground surface, was filled and compacted with clay, and topped with one more bag of Sakrete.

The pole was trimmed to whatever the recommended height for a mailbox. The plate was mounted to the pole with some large lag bolts. The mailbox was attached to the plate.

Several weeks later we found that or mailbox and pole were leaning over. Around the pole we found various automotive lamp assembly pieces and bumper trim.

The county police gathered the materials. They knew what kind of vehicle they were from. We don't know if anything more happened, but we had regular arrests in or area for mailbox destruction.

Repairs to the mailbox were relatively minor.

Ken, I was thinking of something along the same lines. 1/4" or 3/8" steel to make the mailbox from, bolted to a 1/4" or 3/8" plate welded to the top of a piece of 4" OD pipe I got from JKB. On the bottom, weld a plate with four 1/4" holes. In the ground cement in another piece of 4" OD pipe with another plate with 1/4" holes welded to it.

Attach with grade 0 1/4 bolts to act as shear bolts.

Then I found out that I can't use the 4" OD pipe as a post.....

I'd make the mailbox to the largest allowable size, and have an angled slip on cover that would be placed on the side that was hit by the snow from the snowplow to direct the snow up and down from the mailbox, effectively turning the one flat side to a plow just for the winter.

Heavy enough to let someone know that they hit something solid, also heavy enough to resist baseball bats. But still not an immovable object of someone were to run off the road.

Before I bought this place, a high school kid was going too fast, went airborne with the car roughly 200' further up the road, and slammed into the tree that was where the mailboxes are now. He died at the scene.

I had the baseball to mailbox problem in Ca. I made a mailbox like what I am planning, and one night I heard the banging down the street of a baseball bat hitting every mailbox on the street. The noise stopped after my place. In the morning, there was a bunch of broken glass in the street at the mailbox. I can only guess the baseball bat bounced off the mailbox and broke a window in the car that was holding the kids....

I moved 3-4 years after that, but that was the last year that we had any problems like that.

esshup,
It's not illegal to use steel or aluminum for a mailbox post per the USPS website, but they suggest not going over 2" OD steel pipe. It is a suggestion just like not to use milk cans full of concrete...

I think the breakaway design we discussed way back has a lot of merit, but also think that 4" OD hunk of pipe can look ominous and threatening to the untrained eye if they don't know the mechanics involved. A short internal tether between the two pieces would pretty much be a must tho.

The biggest problem with mailboxes up here is usually it's a post buried in the ground, then gets whacked, either by a snow plow or a car hits it and breaks the post off. Want to dig a new hole in the winter??? Not me!, so I would rather do something solid underground and surface mount the post to it. Actually, I only want to dig the hole once!

You want to hit a railroad tie buried in the ground?

That breakaway design I came up with in a long PM would be safer than that, even with the 4" OD pipe.

Bolt it together with a couple shear bolts they use on snowblower augers.

What about putting the mailbox on a pivot, with a heavy counterweight at the base? Let gravity stand it up, but give it a range of movement.

You mean one of those punching things you had as a kid that would always stand back up after you beat the crap out of it?

Yep!! Only I envision the vertical post sitting back a little away from the road, with a horizontal pipe coming out to where the box is now. On this horizontal piece, fabricate a swinging vertical post, with the short end on top supporting the mailbox, and the long end hanging down with the counterweight..

If you wanted to be fancy, you could add a provision to pin it into place for summer use, when it didn't need to swing.

Tony, that design would work very well, but unfortunately there are 2 mailboxes in close proximity to one another. The pivot would slam one into the other. I saw that design last year and it looked relatively easy to make too, but not with 2 side by side.

JKB, I must have misread the specs. If a shear plate style will work, that is good enough for me.

I could also camo it by taking 1x6's and screwing 4 together to make it look like a wood post.....

and NO, I don't think a RR tie would be any better but it might have made it more legal if the metal post wasn't allowed.

To continue this thread diversion:
At the last place I lived before buying this little farm, we had to have our mailboxes encased in an approximately 2 foot by 2 foot by 5 foot high brick enclosure. Most were just hollow shells, broken to bits by the first car that hit them. I filled mine with a mixture of wet concrete and broken bricks. When it first got hit (by a city truck backing too fast) it was just knocked over. The city guy had a backhoe come and set it back upright. No damage that time but some chipped bricks. The next time it got knocked over (by a speeding car that was heavily damaged), I had to put a few rows of new bricks on the top, but never any damage to the mailbox itself. If I had poured a two or three foot deep pad and used several 1" rebars up into the structure, it might have never been knocked over, but it was just sitting on a flat concrete base.

I give thanks every day that we no longer live in a subdivision in a college town. Nearly every mailbox on our block and the next block over was knocked over at least once in the 15 plus years I lived there. It was almost always a mixture of college boys and alcohol. Such brick mailboxes should have never been required, as they were a waste of money and resources. A simple T post would have sufficed.

If you don't have your magazine yet, please call LeighAnn at the PB office.

I really don't like going over old stuff, but you could at least build a wall in front of your mailbox from a couple of 4x4 posts and some deck boards, so when the snow hit's it from the plow, the mailbox will be there in the morning.

They do that all over here, but there are also a lot of steel structures as well.

"T" posts and metal roofing is there now.

Let's see this when you get done.

I see this thread going to mailbox engineering.

Could be fun!

I once saw a stop sign that had been hit so many times they welded a truck coil spring to the bottom of the post.....True story...Wish I had taken a picture.