The Fast and the Furious: Mos Eisley Drift Part 1 -- Mobquet A-1 Deluxe Floater

This is Part 1 of a three-part series entitled "The Fast and the Furious: Mos Eisley Drift," where I will showcase one of my three custom Mos Eisley landspeeders in each part. Technically, there are four additional, unique landspeeders in the Mos Eisley street and alley way scene -- Mobquet A-1 Floater Deluxe, Sorosuub V-35 Courier, Ubrickkian 9000 Z001, and Void Spider TX-3 -- but I have only made customs of three of them thus far.

So, Part 1 will cover the Mobquet A-1 Deluxe Floater landspeeder

The "Mobquet Landspeeder" from the ILM original blueprints is a cylindrical speeder with engine pipes on each side and tail fins, at least on the blueprint design. Although, I am confident that ILM only built one model, there are actually two A-1 Deluxe Floater landspeeders seen in Mos Eisley: (1) parked outside of the cantina and (2) parked under an arch at the landspeeder sales lot. The A-1 speeder in front of the cantina has a red underbelly and trim paint details, while the A-1 speeder at Wiolsea's sales lot does not. Also, from behind the scenes photos, you can see that ILM did not construct the tail fins and they reversed the engine pipe designs from the blueprints.

I found an A-1 Deluxe Floater STL file on Cults3D and had a local vender Lolli & Pops Studio [https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61570639495920] print the speeder for me. They did an excellent job! The print lines are very fine, and the quality feels like a factory-produced toy. In hindsight, I wish I would have chosen a different file though because this 3D STL file has the engine pipes connected to the chassis, which made it a pain to paint the red details. Also, as you will see, the seat design does not allow a modern figure to fit with the canopy closed. One other minor detail is that the trim lines on this file are raised when the actual prop has recessed trim/body lines. So, I think I would have preferred whatever STL file Hole in the Ground used as the base for their model or an STL file similar to their product. 

Lolli & Pops also threw in a transparent canopy. I sanded it down with 600 grit wet-dry sandpaper and even used some headlight paste on it to smooth out the print lines. It helped some, but would probably work better as a clear resin cast/pour if someone really wanted a clear canopy.

I spray painted the body with a Satin White. Originally, I tried masking off the the top section and engine pipes to spray paint the bottom Fire Engine Red, but my masking allowed for over spray. So, I ended up just hand painting the red under belly, fins, and engine sections.

The stand was printed in a dark grey. So, I did not add any paint to this section. In hindsight, it would have been better if this stand was printed in clear plastic. I may try to make a clear resin cast of the stand.

I spray painted the canopy with Deep Turquois gloss and the interior in light grey. I also painted the engine pipes and rear thruster in Pavement then weathered the body with various techniques, topping the entire body in a coat of Oiled Earth wash. As you can see the seat is ill designed. Even with a basic sized figure like Greedo, the canopy will not sit all the way down. A better design would be a lower seat and maybe even back-to-back seats like the Snowspeeder to allow two figures to sit inside.

The Mobquet A-1 Deluxe Floater speeder will sit on display in front of my Haslab Cantina. So, basically, it will be a glorified diorama piece. Overall, I am pretty satisfied with how this turned out, but for any customizers that have not built an A-1 speeder yet, I would recommend either (1) buying the model from Hole in the Ground or (2) finding an STL 3D print file similar to Hole in the Ground's model that has the engine pipes unattached, a deeper seating area, and the recessed trim/body lines.