I have decided to quit renting a Post Office Box and just go with a rural delivery box. Solves two problems: Saves me $85 a year and avoids confusion between mailing address and physical address which is frequently a pain in the ass when ordering on line.

Carved a chunk out of a spot in the lawn that never grew grass anyway and backfilled it with compacted crushed stone. That way the mail driver has a place to pull out of the traffic lane while delivering my mail. Made a post out of some treated 4x4. Next step is to dig the hole.

My shoulders, back and especially hands no longer have the strength to use a manual clamshell digger, so I arranged to borrow Dale the Builder's 3 point hitch Post Hole Digger. That's a whole other chapter, let's just say it ruined half a day while I loaded up the tractor, drove to his lot, drug the damn thing out of the bushes and wrassled it onto my tractor.

I went to all that effort figuring I'd run into the usual hell-hole of rocks, pin gravel and blue clay. Even brought my big pick bar up from the barn just knowing I'd be cussing it momentarily.

Got lined up, dropped the auger and hit the PTO and the fuckin' thing flat disappeared! Nothing but red sand all the way down to the power head. Just hitting a little blue sand when I ran out of auger. Wound up dipping sand out of the bottom of the hole with a plastic tub.

Of course, had I NOT borrowed the power auger, I'd have hit a Volkswagen-sized rock before I was down a foot.

After 3 days (I start at 7:00 and knock off about 2:00 cuz I'm old and lazy) it's all done less having Baby Dottir paint the address on the box.

Looks good. I am sure without the auger life would have gotten much more complicated.

I don't know, with all that work to get the PTO auger to the site, I'd probably looked for more places to make holes....

Box looks great, it's amazing what you can do when stretching a 1 day job to 3!

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:
I don't know, with all that work to get the PTO auger to the site, I'd probably looked for more places to make holes....

Box looks great, it's amazing what you can do when stretching a 1 day job to 3!

I used to have my own when I was keeping sheep. Built a lot of fence, dug a lot of holes. Sold it when I gave up sheep, have regretted it a couple of times since.

An auger was one of my chosen included implements when I bought my Kubota. My ground is about 60% river rock and 40% dirt. Ain't no way a guy is getting through that with a post hole digger by hand. Second only to the backhoe, it was money well spent.

Good looking mailbox you got there.

Turned out nice! Here in the Yoop, after planting the mailbox, you have to up-armor it with a barrier wall to keep high velocity snow from the passing snowplow from destroying the mailbox.

You need to move it a few feet closer to the road. The snowplow driver is gonna have a helluva time trying to hit that!

How much snow do you get? Enough to require plowing? Postal employees are not obligated to risk getting the truck stuck or navigate their way on foot across the snow, or over a snow berm caused by the plow, to put the mail in the box. Your street will also be the last to be plowed, if they even do.

quote:

Originally posted by egregore:
How much snow do you get? Enough to require plowing? Postal employees are not obligated to risk getting the truck stuck or navigate their way on foot across the snow, or over a snow berm caused by the plow, to put the mail in the box. Your street will also be the last to be plowed, if they even do.

It varies. Last few Winters, not much. I have a 5 foot blower on my tractor that I clear the driveway with. An extra minute to clear the box turnout won't be an issue.

quote:

Originally posted by 1967Goat:
You need to move it a few feet closer to the road. The snowplow driver is gonna have a helluva time trying to hit that!

You underestimate the talent of our drivers. And, more to the point, the width of their wings...

A county crew did a excellent number once on a friend’s mailbox with a tractor mounted sickle bar mower. The operator didn’t raise the bar soon enough.

Post, box, and the contents of the mailbox were distributed along the shoulder of the road. The post was pretty much there, the box didn’t fare as well nor were the contents.

He was going to file a claim against the county, don’t know how that ever came out though.

Once upon a time I went outside to check the mail. See my across the street neighbor John. Hi John, looks like someone got your mailbox and left it laying there. Yeah says John, I'm gonna call the cops and report it. Good luck I says, see ya later.....hey John, maybe you could use this, handing him a rear bumper with license plate attached from my front drainage ditch.

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:
I don't know, with all that work to get the PTO auger to the site, I'd probably looked for more places to make holes.......

Stranger in Key West: "...Maine?! How'd ya get all the way down here with that rig?"

PHP: "Well, I started sellin' holes at a buck fifty each. One million, eight hundred dollars later, here I am. Ya still got any of them Margaritas 'round here?

Don't drill too deep in Key West! It'll sink.

quote:

Originally posted by Johnny 3eagles:

Don't drill too deep in Key West! It'll sink.

If you drill all the holes on one end, it will tip over.

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:
I don't know, with all that work to get the PTO auger to the site, I'd probably looked for more places to make holes....

Box looks great, it's amazing what you can do when stretching a 1 day job to 3!

Taking it back was every bit as much of a pain in the ass as picking it up. PTO shaft would NOT come loose from the splines on the tractor. Wound up disconnecting everything else, beating on the lock pin with a hammer, prying on the U-joint with a tire iron to get it started and then driving away until it popped off.

Only consolation is that digging the hole with clamshells would have been literally impossible as the sand just runs out of the jaws when you pick it out of the hole.

Nice job and looks good.... But just wait till some lazy postal employee or a new postmaster does not want to drive off the actual roadway to be able to physically reach your mailbox and require you to move it much closer to the actual roadway.....But yet they will sit out in the roadway blocking other traffic while they complete their appointed rounds.... Trust me that this does happen more often than you think.. And the problem is that they have that power to refuse to deliver your mail if they can claim your box is not up to their code................... drill sgt.

That saw tooth gizmo dangling down underneath the box ,
Where the reproductive parts should be.

What's that about ?

quote:

Originally posted by bendable:
That saw tooth gizmo dangling down underneath the box ,
Where the reproductive parts should be.

What's that about ?

Two reasons behind that:

1. Support for the horizontal arm to take some of the load off the half-lap joint.

2. Ties in with my "yard art" built from farm machinery parts. They are the lever quadrants off an antique spring tooth drag.

An example of yard art I built for a customer. There are parts from a disk harrow, a manure spreader, and a dump rake, plus some random plumbing bits.