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Crumpled Cardboard Toy Boxes: Doing the Ironing

After ironing, the Hubley box flaps are now straight and true.

By Douglas R. Kelly

 

On the annoyance scale, there are probably worse things than a creased/wrinkled/crumpled box. I just can’t think of any at the moment. Finding a great vintage toy that has a less-than-great condition box is—for me at least—an exercise in frustration.

 

It’s one thing when the box is incomplete … missing flaps or holes punched through are easier to stomach than a complete box that looks like someone sat on it. That’s because it didn’t have to be that way: the thing is complete yet someone in 1958 or 1975 or 2006 just had to throw it in a backpack with a bunch of books or leave it sitting on a dusty shelf under a bag of glass doorknobs. Did they even spare a thought for the emotional well-being of future collectors?

I recently had an opportunity to balance the scales just a little bit. Two boxes came my way that were suffering from warped edges and flaps, so I pinged my friend Andrew Ralston—one of the planet’s foremost experts on toy cars—and asked him to fill me in on a technique he’d mentioned to me a number of years ago: getting the creases and warps out of a vintage box by ironing it. With a clothes iron. As if it’s a sports shirt or a pair of slacks. At the time I didn’t give it much thought, but now I had two patients in need of immediate attention, and no way was I going to let them down.

After ironing, the Hubley box flaps are now straight and true.
After ironing, the Hubley box flaps are now straight and true.

One was the box that came with a Hubley Jaguar, a 7.5-inch die-cast toy that Hubley billed as the Sports Car. It’s a beautiful toy, made during the mid-1950s and numbered 455 by the Pennsylvania toy maker. I’d wanted a top condition example for years and it finally drove into my parking lot on a trip to Ohio last summer, where I spotted it in a locked case in an antique mall. But the end flaps on both ends of the accompanying box were bent … warped, essentially, and in a way that couldn’t be fixed by applying gentle thumb and finger pressure.

The other box was for a British toy called The Crystal Car, a four-inch long plastic model of, well, possibly a Humber or a Singer or another early post-war English sedan. I haven’t actually identified it yet. But it’s a wonderful and incredibly rare model made by some obscure British toy maker in the early 1950s. I’d never seen an example before, so I put in my best bid for it with Vectis Auctions in the U.K. in November, and before I knew it the Crystal Car had taken up residence in my toy room.

Given the rarity of the piece, I wasn’t too bothered at first by the warped box lid, but once I decided to work on the Hubley box, I figured I’d see what I could do with this one too. Now, a word about the words liability and responsibility: neither I nor the Journal of Antiques and Collectibles have any—liability or responsibility, that is—should you decide to try this yourself. I share this for informational purposes only; it worked well for me, but I have no idea how it might work for anyone else or on other boxes. All right, enough with the legal stuff.

I placed a clean sheet of paper on our kitchen table, then laid the Hubley box flat on top of the paper. I then placed another sheet of paper on top of the flattened box, and then I placed the whole “sandwich” inside a clean towel (one of those small kitchen towels). Setting our iron on the lowest setting, I ran it over the towel several times, then checked the box to be sure all was well. It was, so I ironed it a few more times, and darned if that Hubley box didn’t come out with flat, straight end flaps. I wondered if the cardboard might return to the original warped condition as it cooled, but it didn’t, so I now have a straight and uncreased box to display with my Jaguar.

“Before” photo of the lid of the Crystal Car box, showing the warping.
“Before” photo of the lid of the Crystal Car box, showing the warping.
This “after” photo shows a flat, straight box lid. Now the author thinks it might be good to go after the tape repairs next.
This “after” photo shows a flat, straight box lid.
Now the author thinks it might be good to go after the tape repairs next.

The Crystal Car box was next, and that was trickier because I couldn’t flatten out the box for ironing due to someone having “repaired” the box at some point with tape. So I did the paper and towel sandwich thing just with the lid, made several passes with the iron … and it worked very well on this one, too. It may be a little hard to tell from the photo, but the Crystal Car lid was seriously bent, so I couldn’t have been more pleased with the result.

Restoration and repair of antiques and toys isn’t my thing, although I recognize that there are people of goodwill who differ from me on that statement. But, as nothing is added or taken away in the process, it seems to me that ironing a box doesn’t change its originality in any way. I’d love to hear what you think, so if you have an opinion on the subject, I’m all ears.

 


Douglas R. Kelly is the editor of Marine Technology magazine. His byline has appeared in Antiques Roadshow Insider; Back Issue; Diecast Collector; RetroFan; and Buildings magazines.

 

 

February 2025: Militaria