Right, so I finally managed to put the rest of the process down on ‘paper’ (as it were), and now it’s getting posted for you all to take in. I hope it’ll be helpful. In the meantime, I’m working on putting together another project write-up and hope to have it available to share with you here very soon.
Alright, so with that done, now we are ready to mount the mailbox, now one other thing you want to make sure is that it’s straight here, going this way so I have lined it up with the driveway and perpendicular to the street so it looks good when you are driving by, it’s not turned or twisted or anything like that and to…..it makes it easier for the postman to get to it from his truck, now one of the things that we’re going to have to do when we are mounting a mailbox on top of the railing and what you’ve got to do is to take the bottom of the mailbox and you’re going to measure both length, which on this one is nineteen and then you’re going to measure width and here we’ve got six inches, okay? So nineteen by six on the inside, what you’re going to have to do is take….and this is, it doesn’t matter on the depth, here I’ve got an inch so what I’m going to do…because the mailbox has got ridges all the way around on both ends especially, it’s not going….when I put it in the arm of the mailbox, hold it, it’s just not going to sit in there correctly, it’s going to sit on top, so what I’ve got to do is to cut a piece of wood that’ll fit on the inside.
An inch thick or more and that I can put on the inside and then inside the ridges here and then screw that in but that cares of the depth part but then how do we make this attached, well let me show you how to do that, okay, now we’re ready to put the support plank on top of the arm of the post, couple of things you’re going to want to do is get it centered, the plank itself centered on the arm and you don’t want to go all the way back the plank itself because it’s got to fit over the lip or the centre of the mailbox, it’s got to fit over it and this actually tucks inside so you’re going to have to pull this back just a little bit before you install this, okay?
So now how do we get this to be straight and everything, so what I’ve done here is just simply taken this post, this post is three and a half inches so if I divide that in [inaudible], that’s one in three quarter inch that I am going to make a mark so what I’ve done here is just make my vertical mark here that tells me, it gives me a reference, this is the centre of the post then what I’ve done is this plank here is six inches across and I divided that to three inches and that’s the centre so what I do is just match both reference points together and then I know everything is aligned.
However what happens out there on the end, so I’ve got to make a mark, but I’m not ready to do that just yet, what I have to do is take my quick square and just go right here, the several points in the middle, mark it three inches.
Again on the end towards the end, not on the plank itself because it’ll stick out past the post arm, so I’m going to make another arm, so at these three points, now I know this is my centre, now why do I have these marks here is because I’m going to put some screws in the middle so I’m going to put the screw right here and then right here and then again right here, so I’m going to pre drill these, so let’s go ahead and do that now, what I do here is to simply take a three sixteenth end bit and I make my first toll and I’m going to go ahead and put it all the way through and so I just do it like so, okay there’s one and then again, two, and then again I do three and the reason I do this is because if I were to go ahead and just drill a screw…put a screw directly in the holes, it will cause the wood to split.
So I don’t want to do that, especially this is cedar wood and it will definitely split, so now we’re ready to go ahead and put the plank on top of the arm now and secure it, okay so I’ve got the screw started and I’m going to allow this again making sure that I’ve got the reference point here and on my board, but what about here on the end, so what I’m going to have to do is figure out how much there’s room on the edge here that I’m just going to take my tape measure and I’ve got an inch and a half, no I’ve got one inch there and I should have one inch here and it’s pretty close, make sure, one and a quarter there and one and a quarter there so I’m fine as far as alignment goes.
So what I’m going to here is to go ahead and secure this first in the back and what I’m using is just a flat head, it was pretty unconventional for me but I’m using a black….a dry wall screw and this is a fine thread on it. So now that we’ve got this all lined up, we’re ready to go ahead and set it. Now remember to pull this out a little bit because you’re going to have to put the top of the mailbox on there, so I’m going to pull it out just a smidge and… Okay that is secure there and now I’m going to measure this in the front one more time to make sure that I have my distance that I want, good there and good here so this is secure.
Now we’re ready to go ahead and screw the front part on, right? And then the middle, now that this is secure, what we’re ready to do is to go ahead and put the mail box on, again if you remember, we’ve got a ridge all the way around so the reason I pulled this out in the back of the plank is to accommodate this ridge right here, so I’m going to go ahead and set it on and make sure everything is square and it is seated properly and it looks great, now what we’re going to do is put some screws on the side, there are some holes here on the side and it goes on both left and right so let’s go ahead and attach these screws now.
Now don’t put them all the way in initially because I want to accommodate for the push on the box on the other side and if you push the screw all the way in, what happens, it bends the screw, it bends the box so you want to make sure that you don’t bend the box, that’s not necessary, it will stay on,. By the way I’m using course on this, again it’s just kind of rough but what I’m using here is kind of a course edge screw instead of a five, the object was…I wanted to use shorter screws on the sides, okay so that’s done, now what we do is do the other side and then we are ready, okay the mail box is set and it’s ready to go, we’re ready to put some mail in there right now and let the US government do what they do best is to deliver mail.