Dragon Mailbox

After searching high and low for one of those goofy rural mailboxes that might resemble a dragon or dinosaur, and coming up empty-handed, I set about building my own. Not having much experience or aptitude for this sort of thing, this on-again/off-again project has taken a little over a year to complete!

Plans are presented here so that anyone so inclined can go about building their own. I'll be providing more thorough instructions here at some point, but I haven't had the time to get this all organized just yet. Until then, the basic patterns are downloadable for those with some woodworking experience. You'll have to figure out suitable methods for painting and attaching all the parts and whatnot.

A couple of quick notes for those attempting construction now:

  1. If you attempt to follow the drawings exactly, the mailbox flag mount interferes with the dragon's left front leg (poor planning on my part). You'll need to either devise a scheme for mounting the flag about an inch higher (this involves drilling new mounting holes for the flag, and filling others), or cut out a notch in the leg to accommodate the flag mount.
  2. The wings may seem a tad far back, but this was necessary to allow space for the flag to swing up and down.
  3. The black lines were done with a Testor's paint marker - a godsend!

The Files

Wood patterns: about 30x24 inches when printed. You'll need to "tile" a number of pages from most printers. Patterns were affixed to 3/4" display-grade plywood using rubber cement, as this is non-permanent and the patterns then peel off easily.

EPS Format (68K)
Suitable for Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, etc.
PDF Format (12K)
Portable Document Format, for Adobe Acrobat.
300 DPI TIFF (288K)
In case the vector formats cause "gas pains." WARNING: 30x24" @ 300DPI = BIG IMAGE!
72 DPI GIF (176K)
In case the big TIFF also causes gas pains. Somewhat less crisp.
Plan view: this is just a side view drawing of all the parts as they should be positioned on the box. Drawn to scale, NOT actual size.

75 DPI GIF (44K)

Paint scheme should be somewhat obvious between the photos above and the side view sketch.

More photos and complete instructions still to come.