tldr; Use a hairdryer to heat tape to allow you to remove it easily leaving minimal residue. Then rub blu-tack on any residue left to remove it.
It's really annoying when you purchase a collectible off ebay, then the seller just tapes it up and posts it off in it's original box rather than placing it inside a separate shipping box. With collectible stuff the box is an important part of the collectible, so to get it covered in large shipping labels and ugly brown parcel tape is a pain.
This recently happened to me, so I've been looking around for solutions to clean the box up and get it looking decent again. The most common suggestion I found was just about using a hairdryer to heat up the tape to allow you to remove it more easily. This did work, though with the amount of tape my package was covered in, it took a long time to get it all off. You just have to heat a section of the tape for half a minute or so, pull that bit up, heat the next few inches, pull that up, etc. until you've eventually got it all off. I also found it didn't work so well where the tape was going over a paper sticker, it was difficult to pull the tape up without ripping the sticker.
After doing this I was still left with a lot of sticky brown residue in various areas where the tape had been. The worst areas were on a couple of paper stickers where the brown residue had just stuck to the stickers and just the plastic part of the parcel tape had lifted up off them.
Most solutions for cleaning up the actual parcel / packing tape residue were to use something like 'Goo Gone'. I have ordered a bottle of this, but my experience with a similar product is that it is quite oily / greasy. While it may make it possible to clean up the tape residue I would expect it would soak into the cardboard and stickers, just giving me a different problem.
A solution I only saw once was a comment from someone suggesting blu-tack (well, actually they suggested the equivalent product from some other country). So I gave this a go, just rubbing the blu-tack on the tape residue and it worked surprisingly well.
Above is actually after cleaning some of the residue from the box, but you can see there is still some residue left on the box, and the sticker is really bad. You can also see my blob of blu-tack I used for the cleaning.
Above image shows partway through cleaning. You have to rub quite a lot with the blu-tack to get the tape residue off. Possibly if you heated the tape residue again if would come off easier? I found that it was particularly stubborn to remove from the paper sticker.
Above shows after cleaning.
Above you can see that this solution unfortunately doesn't work for all cases. While the blu-tack did remove the brown sticky tape residue, it also removed the ink from the printing on the sticker. So I decided to leave this sticker as it is. Maybe I will try some of the goo gone on it when I get that, unless anyone has any better ideas?
