I can't really say how I came up with the concept of the Canada Post delivery spacecraft, but the more I thought about it the more I thought that at the very least it would give me an opportunity to practice spray painting a mildly complex pattern and try my hand at making custom decals -- both things I hadn't done before. The paint scheme is similar to that seen on Canada Post mail trucks. The truck in the picture below is about the same scale as the space taxi and came from the postal kiosk at the mall. I had a great deal of fun building this model and it gave me confidence to try some other projects I had in mind.

The fuselage came in two halves and needed a great deal of filling and sanding to make the structure cylindrical. I left off the front cage and replaced it with an eratz space-station docking adaptor made from the screw top cut from a 45 mm diameter plastic vitamin bottle. The docking adaptor was epoxied to the front of the fuselage for strength.

The original kit had forward and aft dimples for attaching the tethers of spacewalking astronauts. On the forward one I mounted a video camera -- for docking maneuvers -- from an AMT / Ertl Moonscope kit. A remote manipulator arm was added to the aft dimple for reaching inside and grabbing packages. The arm is scratchbuilt from nested styrene tubes mounted on an antenna base from the Moonscope kit. That kit also donated the light on the manipulator's end-effector.

Image: Another look

Image: With predesessor