Road rage
The folks at Otter Products offer, as proof of the box's strength, the photograph you see in Figure E. In the picture we see a rugged jeep parked atop an Otter Box. It makes quite an impressive visual.

FIGURE E


The Otter Box Web site offers this visual proof of the box's strength. Roll over picture for a larger image.

However, I wanted to see this for myself. To test the Otter Box's assertions of indestructibility, I would face it off against my 1990 Chevy Lumina. Once again, my lunchmeat would be standing in for my PalmPilot lest anything unfortunate happen.

In the parking lot of my apartment complex, I monitored the experiment as my assistant pulled the vehicle's front, right tire up onto the Otter Box, as you can see in Figure F.

FIGURE F


The Otter Box strains under the pressure of my Chevy Lumina. Roll over picture for a larger image.

As the tire rolled up onto the box, I was stunned by the sound of two loud pops. A moment later the car rolled off, and I picked up the Otter Box to examine the results. Two jagged cracks had formed in the fiber-glass-reinforced ABS resin, and the closed cell neoprene o-ring had snapped.

The bologna, however, was untouched.

Analysis
Did the Otter Box fail the crush proof test? Well, in fairness, here are the exact words Otter Products use on their Web site to describe their picture of the jeep resting on top of the box: "Some of the boxes have been placed under the wheels of vehicles with no effect to the box whatsoever." The key words here are "placed under."

I don't know how that picture was created, but if the jeep had been jacked up and then lowered on top of the box, the weight would have been evenly distributed over the surface of the box. In my experiment, at the moment the tire began to roll up over the leading edge, all the weight of the vehicle was focused on that edge. Also, though I'm no expert in physics, the downward motion of the rotating tire probably exerted extreme amounts of force-far more than the mere weight of the car would create.

The point we should focus on is that even after suffering that initial structural damage, the box did not completely cave in. It's still basically intact (though no longer watertight). If my PalmPilot had been in there it would have emerged unscathed, just like the bologna.