A little background: We live in a rural area. Our driveway is about .2 miles long. The mailbox is located at the road, next to the driveway. We can’t see the mailbox from the house.
Some assbags ran over our mailbox last night. This is the fifth time in fives years this has happened. :mad:
What can we do about this? My evil side has thought of using a heavy steel beam for the post. But then we’d probably get sued if someone ran into it and got killed (even if they did it on purpose).
Set up a “false mailbox” on the edge of the road, filled with red paint. After it gets run over, scout around for a car covered in red paint. Then exact your revenge.
Actually, I’d say go ahead and use a heavy beam. Plenty of people have brick mailboxes, large rocks or columns at their driveway entrances. I wouldn’t worry too much about getting sued. And maybe put some reflectors on it, if you think it’s happening by accident. Or you could get a P.O. Box and ditch the mailbox, although that does smack of admitting defeat.
First, find out if it’s legal to own and operate a lethal mailbox. If it is, go ahead and build it. You will, however, have to live with yourself if someone dies because they ran into it. It may be vandals, it may be accidental, it may be a combination.
Ours gets hit by the plow. My husband has since put it on a spinny pole so it just wings around when the snow hits it. We’ve found mail in April that was delivered in December and covered by snow. Kinda like a scavenger hunt! WooHOO!!!
I can’t imagine why you’d get sued if someone ran into your mailbox. We had a similar problem when I was growing up, and my father eventually resorted to using a heavy steel post and sinking it in a lot of cement. He then put a gigantic boulder near the base and made a rock garden around it. It never got knocked over again.
I heard of someone (I can’t remember if someone told about it here or if a friend told me) that bought a large mailbox, some concrete, and a smaller mailbox. He put the smaller box inside the larger and then filled all of the space around it with concrete. He then put it on some sort of similarly rigged pole.
He had had problems, IIRC, with some kids hitting his previous mailboxes with a bat from a moving car or just driving the mailboxes down. It only happened once after he did this and not again.
Did you have snow? I had a big problem with the snowplows destroying my mailbox until I devised the Mother Of All Mailbox Posts.
I have a 4 inch vertical steel pipe set 6 feet back from the shoulder. The horizontal section is a 6 foot steel bar attached to a free-rotating collar on top of the steel pipe. The mailbox is attached to the other end, with the plastic newspaper box attached to the side of the mailbox to act as a shock absorber. Then I have a heavy duty rubber bungee cord at a 45° angle connected at one end to the mailbox bar and the other end to the post.
So now if something hits my mailbox, it just swivels out of the way and then the bungee cord swings it back into position.
It would be so much easier to post a picture than to try to describe it, hope the above makes sense.
IANAL, but I think that you are more likely to be sued if you use automobile “unfriendly” means. Many signs and posts on highways are specifically designed to break away upon impact. Winter approaches, and if someone hits black ice, and becomes the irresistible force into your immovable object, you may be responsible for injury or death in a situation that was unavoidable.
Talk to the Postmaster in your local post office. Most of the time these folks are more than happy to help out. Find out what is allowed for a mailbox support. They may have a suggestion, or they may allow you to locate your mailbox a little closer to your house and out of the road right-of-way.
There’a a mailbox near us that’s enclosed in its own stone-and-mortar housing. The whole structure is about 2 feet square by 4 feet high (or however tall a rural mailbox should be). It’s quite decorative and looks impervious to all but a nuclear blast.
We still use the old metal mailbox (at least fifty years old) that belonged to this homestead back when they first started delivering rural mail. It’s HEAVY and SOLID. Has a few dings from the plow, but that’s about it. I imagine that if anyone tried to take a bat to it, they’d get the same treatment as the guy who tried to clonk Superman with the crowbar: DOINNGGGGGGGGG!! Maybe you can get your hands on one like that.
I read somewhere (i believe it was here) of someone with a similar problem, some knuckledragger kept running over the poster’s trash can, so the poster went out and sunk a thick steel pole into the edge of the driveway, filled it with concrete, then purchased a “dummy” trash can that he cut the bottom out of, and slid it over the pole
the next week, the knuckledragger tried to run over the can again, and the owner was pleased to see a bunch of Camaro fragments scattered around the “dummy” can
maybe you could try something like that…
personally, i’d try to develop a “reactive armored” mailbox, hit it with a baseball bat, and the armor plating explodes back at the assailant…
woohoo! That was me, posting a bit from a Joel Rosenberg novel. Fictional, so far as I know, but I don’t know why it wouldn’t work.
One thing people do in rural areas here to keep their mailboxes from getting plowed is to have them on long, swinging arms with no pole underneath them; unfortunately, in your case, that makes it more fun for the joyriders (it’s like jousting…).
I’d go with the big, blatant, reflector covered rusty I-beam sticking out of the ground just in front of the mailbox post. If you get sued, I want to be there when the judge looks at the guy and says, “which part of big, blatant, reflector covered rusty I-beam sticking out of the ground didn’t you get?”
What a coincidence. My wife and I got home last night to find that some asswipe had run over our brick mailbox. Bricks and mortar covered half our driveway. I am beyond pissed.
Thing is, our neighborhood is pretty isolated, so the person who did it must be local. I’m cruising the neighborhood tonight to see if I can spot the car (the neighbor who called the police gave a description of the car, but not a license number).
My father ended this by using a wrought iron decrative two pole stand for the box. It’s was strong enough to not just flatten, but did give if run over. It was good at damaging the oil pans of young teens, who could turn off the vehicle or burn up the engine. They had to be towed and we got a new stand and box paid for.
A seperate isuue brought up is this. Mail boxes are at the decapitation height when they get hit and have killed people that went out of control and the people that do it on purpose. Some states have passed laws against the sturdy boxes, and will make you remove them. A number of years back a television show had a man that started to make a swivel poled mailbox. A snow plow can pass by and the box swings around and goes back undamaged. No matter how obnoxious the people doing this are, I wouldn’t want them dead for it.
Have you ever been to a drive through like McDonalds? You know those big metal posts filled with concrete they have to prevent people from sheering off the drive up window? Plant one of those on each side of your mailbox about 1 foot away and 6 inches in front of it. I bet no one ever hits your mailbox again without their car suffering undrivable damage.
I think they key is to put up something visible, which will obviously wreck a car that hits it, but which is not particuarly dangerous in itself.
A bunch of hefty rocks painted white would do it - big enough to crack the oil pan or damage the suspension, but small enough that a vehicle will deflect over the top in the event of an accident or just knowck them out of the way. You don’t need to make the postbox indestructible, just discourage people from messing with it unecessarily. If you get snow, remember to mark the extent of the rocks with the usual orange poles.
That sounds the best plan; have the post emerge from the top of a concrete or stone pyramid; a car hitting it on purpose will ride on top and be badly damaged; a car hitting it accidentally will do the same, but it won’t be a dead stop, so it shouldn’t increase the risk to life and limb.
