Starspeeder Mailbox Build

This build all came about one day when I was thinking about the Starspeeder in the Star Tours queue line at Disneyland. I've never been a huge fan of Star Wars but I appreciate it for what it's worth. But the magic that I feel, even to this day, when I am going through the line for Star Tours, is special. You feel so immersed in the experience, as if you're really going to board a space craft for an interstellar adventure.

I'm always thinking about what I can build that would be fun but could also be practical. Then the idea of a mailbox came into my head. The Starspeeder is box shaped and I thought making this would be a cinch.

I recently acquired a scroll saw thanks to my brother Levi. But as it turns out, making precise and smooth cuts with a scroll, was not as easy as I thought it would be. Alas, I fashioned the body of the Starspeeder out of pine and slapped everything together. I hinged the front so that there would be door for the mail.

Once it was cut out, the pieces assembled and the seams spackled and sanded, I thought I would give it a base coat of paint. I used a white spray that had a gloss. This turned out to be a bad idea as the gloss made it very difficult to lay the next round of paint or to draw pencil lines on it.

The real challenge was the detail painting. There are at least two versions of this craft that have been introduced to the Disney parks over the years. There is the white with blue stripes Starspeeder which I believe is the 3000 version. But the orange version, the 1000, is just a bit more dashing in my opinion. On my recent trip to Disneyland Paris, their Star Tours was featuring the orange version and since I love this unique, rusty color anyway, the decision was final. There were some templates that I found online for the designs. Using that information, I made some templates of my own and created some stencils. But it really just came down to free-handing everything. Both sides needed to be symmetrical (enough) so there was a lot of measuring. And there was a lot of painting back and forth with the dark and light colors. The white and orange paints were fairly translucent so I had to do several coats of both.The finished contour lines were done in ink. Then it was finished with a couple of coats of gloss spray.

The base is a plastic mailbox base that was attached to the bottom of the ship and is designed so that it can be attached to many different types of posts. This also gave me the opportunity to paint the landing gear on the base. I had originally envisioned using a traditional 4"x4" for the post but I couldn't find just a scrap (for display purposes) so I build the "4"x4"" from 1" pine and attached it as a 4"x4".

And I almost forgot about lil R2. I fashioned him from wood, plastic and foam and then hand-painted and attached to the final build. I wanted to have it so that he would be free standing and could possibly be used as a button to press when mail would be delivered. I wanted it to activate either a light or a flag. But this idea may have to live on in the next build after I design the concept better. And that's providing I even build another one of these.

I wasn't sure if this was ever something that would be used practically but now that I've put in so much work, I would hate to see it being abused by the weather or ever worse, stolen. So as it stands now, it is a fully functional mailbox that may or may not be put into the field.