For fans who want to ride in an X-wing Fighter without a pilot’s license, this might be the extreme craft for you! A talented fan made this awesomely-detailed soapbox derby car that looks like an X-wing complete with a beeping R2-D2 as the co-pilot!

There were a lot of details in the X-wing car and almost all were done on the cheap. The entire car cost under about $75. There were 7 pieces to the car that were assembled at the race site: 4 turrets, 2 wings, and one car body.

R2-D69: The spinning droid was constructed of Styrofoam and painted to look like R2-D2. I used one of my daughter’s old toys to create the motion. The toy had a gear on it that spun when a button was pushed. I cut the toy in half (it was too big) and mounted the toy to the underside of the body and glued the droid head onto the gear.

To control the spinning I used an old NES controller. I re-routed the toy’s switch through the NES controller so when the A or B buttons were pushed the droid would spin for about 15 seconds.

For audio, I downloaded some R2-D2 sound effects from a website and used Pinnacle movie studio software to string them all together into a 50 second babbling droid Mp3. I loaded this onto an iPod and connected it to a small portable speaker system that I hid inside the body of the car. This way, each time I started down the hill, I could push the NES controller button and the iPod play button to commence the droid freak-out.

The wings were another tricky part. I made two sets of brackets that would hold the wings in the correct X shape and could be mounted to the sides of the car. Some drainage piping was used for the “engine” things.

Read more about this craft here:
X-Wing Fighter Soapbox Derby Car (via Instructables)