I live on a highway and a couple of years ago, the postal service replaced all of our mail boxes on posts with mail boxes with crash proof posts. What is a crash proof mail box? Why do we have to have them?
Not to hijack your thread, but here I go anyway.
Quite a few people in the sections of town with rural mail delivery (boxes at the street, not on the house) have built themselves armored mailboxes. It seems that the great passtime of the local youth is driving down the longer roads in town playing “Mailbox Baseball”: swing a bat and smash as many mailboxes as they can. The box owners tend to get a bit upset about that, so they either build a box around the mailbox, or make a mailbox out of 1/4" steel (such as my fiance’s father did). I’d say I feel bad for the next guy to smash that mailbox, but I really don’t.
Jeremy…
Nobody ever calls me after they’ve done something smart.
When I delivered pizza, I noticed the mailboxes on the streets near the local high school were mostly beat up. I heard this was mainly done by celebrating fans after HS games.
One house, however, had an intact mailbox. The guy had welded together plates of metal that were used for heat sinks (they had 1 inch vanes all over them) to make his new mailbox.
I don’t know if anyone actually tried to bat it, but it would’ve been funny to see if they tried.
Judges 14:9 - So [Samson] scraped the honey into his hands and went on, eating as he went. When he came to his father and mother, he gave some to them and they ate it; but he did not tell them that he had scraped the honey out of the body of the lion.
We live on a fairly quiet street with a 30 mph speed limit.
The fashion here has become to erect brick or adobe structures (4’ high x 2’ wide x 2’ deep) encasing the mailbox, which remains at regulation height, sometimes with planters off to the side with yucca or cacti in them.
One would think these would be relatively crash proof, but alas - one idiot kid misjudged his speed and/or the turn he made onto our street & lifted the mailbox structure clear out of the ground.
On the plus side, it wasn’t a hit & run…
He was fine; the radiator on his car was not.
Sue from El Paso
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
Back in Minnesota all the rural mailboxes had posts that would pivot. The theory was that when the snowplow hit them they would just swing out of the way, neither harming the plow nor getting harmed.
I’d consider that crashproof, but I haven’t seen perkitl’s mailbox, so I may be hijacking this thread again.
Some kids I knew would smash all the headlights of cars parked along a street.
I’ve seen ads (someplace) for double mailboxes with cement fill between the two. Supposed to stand up to “Mailbox Baseball.”
I wonder if kids really do get hurt swatting the “crash proof mailboxes” seems like the bat would bounce back quite smartly.
Other than this, I’d guess the crash proof post and mailboxes wouldn’t stand up to more than a gentle backing up into by a car or snow plow.
Oh, I’m gonna keep using these #%@&* codes 'til I get 'em right.
“I wonder if kids really do get hurt swatting the “crash proof mailboxes”
seems like the bat would bounce back quite smartly.”
Oh, you bet. The bat flies backwards, too. Note: Not from personal experience 
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- I heard it similar to Nekosoft: mailboxes on posts that stick out of the ground and are “L” shaped, with the short leg in the ground. The reason (where I live) is that the long horizontal extension reaches across the roadside drainage ditches common in rural areas, to make delivering from the seat of the vehicle possible for the mail carrier. The problem with it is that if a car swerves for whatever reason, the “mail” gets delivered through the windshield, into the front seat. - I seem to recall that there was a move somewhere, sometime back to ban these types of mail posts, but I don’t remember much about it. The posts are still used all over around here, but newer “Cornfield Estates” and “Soybean Manors” houses tend to go for the more decorative, armored types mentioned. (Silly yuppies; country kids can always get their hands on 30-30-10 fertilizer). - MC
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When I said crash proof mail box, I didn’t mean that you could not crash down the box and posts. Maybe they are to protect the cars and passengers if they should run off the road.
Another note about the war against mailbox smashers: my dad made a mailbox… this must have been 11 or 12 years ago… like the one someone said you could buy. He got one of those HUGE jumbo mailboxes and a regular mailbox, nested them together and filled the 4" gap on all sides with concrete. He also parked the 4 x 4 holding the thing up about 2 or 3 feet into the ground, in a block of cement. He loved to show this to people: he’d take a baseball bat and hit the concrete sidewalk, then hit the mailbox. It sounded (and felt) exactly the same. That was one TOUGH mailbox.
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I recall once on the news or some film or something some guy got fed up with the kids hitting his box so he made an exploding mail box. Boy were they ever surprised one day.
There have been incidents in town of battered mail boxes, and the ones that couldn’t be smashed to hell were stuffed with roadkill. We have very inventive teens in our town, but not all are really “smart”.
One summer evening several years ago, there were three teens on bicycles, riding around town blowing up mailboxes with some quite powerful cherry bombs.
The first kid would open the door as he rode by, the second kid would toss in the cherry bomb, the third kid would whack the door shut.
They came up our street leaving a trail of muffled bangs and falling debris. This is where things started to go wrong for them. They came to the dead end, turned around and saw a couple dozen angry homeowners standing in the street waiting for them to return.
Needless to say, the police took possession of the “mussed up” teens, three piles of twisted junk that had once been bicycles, and a large amount of cherry bombs in a knapsack.
FixedBack
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perkitl, I don’t know how it is in Louisiana, but I can tell you how it goes with the mailbox thing here in Ohio. I kinda suspect that you don’t mean “crash proof” at all, but rather you’re referring to mailboxes – and ESPECIALLY the posts they sit on – being, shall we say, “crash-friendly.”
In Ohio, the Department of Transportation (hereinafter “ODOT,” in deference to my fingers) has adopted some pretty specific guidelines that amount to regulations on what you can or can’t use as a mailbox post along a state highway. The idea is to eliminate the sort of massive brick/concrete/adobe structures along the lines of what Majormd referred to in his post. ODOT considers such monuments to be a hazard to the motoring public, and ODOT is right, at least in terms of the members of the motoring public that happen to run off the road.
ODOT’s reasoning is that, while having to occasionally replace a bashed mailbox is an inconvenience, when someone runs off the road – and someone will on a regular basis – the consequences of encountering armored mailboxes include massive vehicular damage and death. (And you STILL lose the mailbox!)
Therefore, in Ohio, ODOT has laid down that thou shalt not install a mailbox post larger than 4"x4" (nominal, wood) or 2" diameter (hollow, steel or iron pipe or tube). Of course, people continue to erect car-buster mailboxes along county and township roads, where ODOT has no jurisdiction.
I don’t know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free…
T