[TheForge] Re: Crush proof mailbox

[Mike Spencer]

My mailbox is 12ga ms sheet.  The post is 1x2 solid bar, tapering at
the top to ca. 1x1 where it supports the mail box and welded into 2"
pipe where it goes into the ground.  The box itself is supported both
above and below.

If you've tried to cold-form 12ga, you know it's slow.  If a kid stood
in the road and beat my box repeatedly with a baseball bat, he'd do it
a little damage.  With a single whack at 40 mph, he might make a
sizable ding in it but at the expense of a painful and...umm,
sanguinary surprise.  I could repair any such ding in less time than
the ER would spend fixing him up.  As it happens, nobody has ever
tried to whack it so there's never been a test of that assertion.
Mail box bashing has never really caught on around here.

If the snowplow hit the box, it it would ding it up pretty bad. If the
plow hit the post dead on with the ground frozen, I suppose  it would
give the plow quite a jolt.

If you want a photo of my mailbox, Don, I can send you one.  Pretty
obvious how it was made so you wouldn't need plans.

Drifting off-topic here -- 40 years ago, the Canadian postal guys were
pretty rigid about rural mail boxes meeting standard Canada Post
specs.  So nearly all mail boxes were fairly heavy galvanized steel
and considerably larger than the standard US RFD box.  Mine isn't the
standard shape but I made it to the standard Canadian size.  Something
must have changed because over the last 20 years, most of the big
Canada Post boxes have disappeared and been replaced by flimsy
aluminum ones of the standard US Mail size.  Just this fall, the
neighbor across the road asked me to make a new post & mount for his
shiny new box from Walmart so I got a close look at one. Purty and
shiny but such an unbelievable POS that I was tempted to bash it with
a crowbar myself. :-)


- Mike



-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^