Watch: Cars have fatal attraction to a front yard mailbox

Originally published at: Watch: Cars have fatal attraction to a front yard mailbox | Boing Boing

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:astonished: Maybe a metal post in a concrete base would help… :thinking:

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Our mailbox was at a turn on a country road and some jackass took great delight in running it down. It was replaced with a much heartier one. No concrete, but a four by four planted at least three feet in the ground was involved. There was a tremendous squealing of brakes as they noticed at the last moment the new mailbox.

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Ours is destroyed about once a year, but being on a rural road, I imagine it’s mailbox baseball, at least some of the time. Last winter it was snowing and icy, and someone obviously ended up in the ditch, but the car was gone by morning. We never did find the mailbox door, maybe it was their souvenir.

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in order to hit ours, they would have to drive up on our porch. i would definitely notice.

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Steel lally column with rebar and concrete inside. Been there done that. Even if they still hit it, they won’t be driving away.

You can take the boy out of New Jersey, but you can’t take the Jersey out of the boy.

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They need to attach that mailbox to that tree, it won’t go down again.

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What’s the postmaster general’s position on Czech hedgehogs?

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I think both hits were from the same car. The second pass shows a driver (I think). The first one may have taken off the Driver’s side Mirror.

It wasn’t ice; it wasn’t night; It may have been alcohol.

I wrote a comment on defending from midnight baseball, in a comment about a year or so ago.

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OMG, is that where that streak in me comes from? :smiling_imp:

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I think I commented in the same thread, one solution to baseball bat attacks is to buy a two sizes of mailbox, put one inside the other and fill the space with concrete.

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Speaking as someone with a rural mailbox bolted to a metal pole which in turn was buried in concrete: it’ll sheer off right where the metal pole is sticking out of the concrete.

Ask me how I know!

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In the rural area where I went to high school, some yahoos delighted in putting a board between the cab and bed of a pickup and then driving around at night taking out mailboxes. One old codger got sick of that so he took a railroad rail (not a tie, a cut piece of rail), sunk that into concrete, and put the mailbox on top of that. Well, yahoos come by with their board, hit that and BOOM, the bed of the pickup popped off the back of the truck.

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To Wile E Coyote S.G.
Your ACME giant magnet was delivered at 8.32 AM today.

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Hard to tell, but it looks like there’s some weirdness with the road where it meets the driveway. Hard to fix something like that. But they could put the mailbox on the left side of the driveway.

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We had a similar issue with our mailbox at my childhood home. After about the 3rd or 4th time it was taken out by a careless driver, my father came home with a 12ft length of 4x4in square, hollow metal pipe. He dug a deep hole and buried about 8ft of that pipe in the ground with concrete. He then filled the pipe with concrete and welded a thick metal base on top where the mailbox would sit.

We never lost a mailbox again to a careless driver though many careless drivers had their cars totalled by our mailbox!

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This is the one detail we didn’t have – see my own experience a few posts above – and that made all the difference.

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In this case, I’d suspend the postbox from the nearby tree, with a thin pole hanging down from it. Anyone that hits it will just push it out of the way, and it’ll swing back once they’ve gone.

Depending on where you are, it’s not allowed. Has to be a permanent installation.

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You have to have a specific style of postbox?
Ah America, never stop being so free. /s