In article ,
Ignoramus1723 wrote:

Some dumbass knocked over our mailbox. It was clearly due to
stupidity, the tracks on the snow show that it was done at slow speed,
the person driving the car left various pieces of his/her mirror, most
likely when he or she was maneuvering. The tracks show that the person
reversed direction shortly (6 ft) after hitting our mailbox. Whatever
damage was done to our mailbox, the damage to the car was 5x that.

I heard a suggestion somewhere to mount mailboxes on spring type
mounts, like garage door springs. The idea is that collisions like
this will only make mailboxes bounce and return to the original
position. I really like this idea, has anyone done something similar?

i


Sproing

For a long time, I delivered a paper to a mailbox mounted on top of
three truck-sized coil springs U-bolted together end-to-end and
concreted into the ground. A lot like those "cast iron
critters-on-a-spring" for kiddies to ride at playgrounds in years gone
by, only taller. Run over it with a tank or a steamroller and you
*MIGHT* convince it to stay down, but I don't think anything less would
manage the task. Whether the mailbox itself can survive the hit is a
whole different question, as should be obvious! But the spring is
likely to stand back up for anything short of being ripped out of the
gorund.

Do those spring-rides still exist, or have they been "OH MY GOD WE GOTTA
PROTECT THE KIDDIES!"-ized into extinction? My favorite, oh so many
years ago, was (Surprise...) the horsey-shaped one. Our playground had
that, a caterpillar, a dolphin, and something that might have been
either a hippo or a pig, or maybe something else, but not even Mr.
Driscoll, the principal, could say for sure - whatever it was, it wore a
yellow fez - lined up side by side between the swings and the monkeybars.


Boy... LOTS of metal in this post - Tons of it, if you count the
steamroller and the tank

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