Defeating teen letterbox vandals

[shedcoupe]

From a boating site -

"Many years ago, my boss was frustrated that his home made crafted wooden letter box was broken by local teens during drunken trips home on Sunday mornings.

It was clear it was locals and he remade the box several times only to find it in pieces on the lawn again and again.

So one weekend he arranged to use the company workshop to craft a new box identical in appearance to the wooden boxes of the past but fabricated in solid steel (we had lots of steel to spare for such an important job). A welder did most of the work for a slab and it took a few more guys a BBQ and a slab to get the manpower to install the new box with a concrete base that would stop a Kenworth.

Per plan a few weekends latter a drunk teen was found at the base of the new box with a substantially broken foot. An ambulance was called the parent's paid for the trip to hospital and the father of the teenager was flooded with copies of bills for other letter boxes that had been damaged over the previous months.

At work we celebrated a moral victory. Occasionally I travel past that letterbox and even though my old boss moved on, our achievement stands and looks like it will last a few more teenagers, I still smile at the thought of that kid on the ground. Pity help the person that will one day remove that box, it took 4 men to lift it into position."

And -

"I had a mate who had a similar problem where his letterbox kept getting run over (frequently). This letterbox was on the side of the road (well back from the edge) and a few local lads thought it funny to continually knock it over.

We did the same thing with a length of railway track concreted into the ground. The letterbox won the following round. It folded the bullbar around it, pushed the radiator into the engine and the engine under the car. The railway iron was nearly 3 feet into the middle of the bonnet. Could have been dangerous, but there were trees closer to the edge of the road than the letterbox."

NB. This sort of thing is of course extremely bad, and unfair to drunk boys.