Four Things You Can Do With Steel Pipe Bollards (Besides Stop Traffic)
Steel pipe bollards are frequently used to prevent vehicles from going beyond a certain point. However, it is easy to rethink the bollard as something akin to or different than its original purpose. Here are four other things you can do with these bollards.
Hitching Posts for Horses
Hitching posts are not all that common anymore. However, there are still cities and towns where it is fairly common to see horses on the streets. If you run a horse or dude ranch, hitching posts are practically a necessity. That said, if you secure a couple of steel bollards in a vertical position, you can use them as hitching posts for all the horses, riders, and horse-drawn vehicles that pass by.
Prevent Parking Problems
When the back of your residential property abuts commercial property, you get people in cars smacking your fence and knocking it over more than you would like. With the permission of the commercial property owner, you can install a series of vertical bollards that prevent over-zealous drivers from banging a fender up against your fence. Instead, they learn when to stop their vehicles when their fenders smack the bollards. Your fence remains intact and undamaged.
French Drain Pipes
If you drill holes along the tops of horizontal bollards, you can turn them into French drains. You can also drop these pipes into the ground, close to your foundation. Then run the pipes to a drainage ditch at the edge of the road. Because of the girth of these pipes, they can handle large volumes of water, much more than traditional French drains can.
Build a Sweat Box
Native Americans build sweat boxes for the purpose of following vision quests. Of course, these sweat boxes are not that different from Nordic saunas. You can use the bollards to build your own sweat box, but you should also construct a means of exiting the sweat box when it gets too hot.
The door should not expand in the heat, nor should it catch fire or melt. It is effective to discuss with a knowledgeable industrial products company what types of materials can withstand extreme heat and contact with metal without melting, catching fire, or expanding. Then you can purchase this material to construct a door from the same supplier that sells you the steel pipe bollards. Do not forget a roof, and a large bucket of water to ladle onto the steel bollards to create steam.
