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That is odd, having been involved in printing in a past life, I find it amazing that has happened. If a pass is not done you can expect several parts of the design missing because of them being the same colour, but to have a part of a colour missing (one of the model ID numbers in Black), is clever!

GHOSTHUNTER.

Never seen anything like it! Could it be a trial of the box art prior to the model number being allocated?

Idris wrote:Never seen anything like it! Could it be a trial of the box art prior to the model number being allocated?

No Hugh, because number had already been allocated as it is on other face as my initial post mentions, this is indeed an odd box variation with just the one face having a blank square and the other having 63 in it, therefore I assume it is down to a printing error.

Rob wrote:

motorman wrote:That is very unusual Rob i have never seen a box error like it!

Quite rare but not unique Alex. On close inspection Mathias shows one among his Gas Tankers in this thread. I thought this was significant enough to have its own post, cheers.

You're right Rob. I hadn't noticed that example that Matthias has. Not so rare then!!

lol...nah, ten a penny, Happy Hogmanay mate

Great eye, Rob. I've viewed this thread several times because I like the Castrol Tankers and never spotted Mathias's blank print rare box. Thanks for posting and the heads up. Something else to watch out for.

Jay

Congrats on finding yours, also!

Jay

Thanks Jay, it's one of those fun things to try and remember along with all the others....to look on both sides of every 63b box, cheers.

That means I have to start by looking at both sides of every box I have now, and go from there... And so it begins.

I do not regard this box variation as very rare, it is just often overlooked. I have such an example too and have seen quite a few others. It is also shown on my website.

My theory is that this happened when the box design was altered to remove the "NEW" lettering above the number in 1976. Somebody inadvertently removed the number together with the "NEW" on one side.

This error must have been noticed and corrected rather quickly, but quite a few boxes had been printed and issued before.