Hammer & Mold brings together original vintage toys, the companies that made them and the stories that made them famous. Explore the history. Watch the commercials. Buy the originals.
Live auctions on original vintage toys. Place a bid, or take it straight away with Buy now.
We organize the collection the way it was built: maker first. The maker is the molder; its toy lines live beneath it. Filter the lines by their maker, or sort them across the years.
The line that invented the modern 3¾-inch action figure, and sold an empty box one Christmas to do it.
Meet the Molder →Proton packs, ecto-plasma and gross-out mutations. The strangest, most inventive toys on the shelf.
Meet the Molder →Soft-vinyl monsters from Tokyo's tokusatsu boom. Godzilla, Ultraman and the beasts of late-night television, hand-poured and hand-painted.
Meet the Molder →The material itself. Hollow Japanese soft vinyl, slush-cast in heated metal moulds, pulled out by hand and sprayed by hand. And Hiroshi Goto, who has been painting it for seventy years.
Meet the Molder →Mutant reptiles, pizza and ooze. The line that turned a black-and-white comic into a worldwide phenomenon.
Meet the Molder →The gentle alien of 1982. Poseable figures, glowing fingers and the most famous bicycle in cinema.
Meet the Molder →Mr. T, machine guns and a black van. No plan survived contact, but the toys did.
Meet the Molder →The monsters you could actually own. Cheap vinyl on a hook by the till, from the company a Holocaust survivor built out of a ten-cent bouncing ball.
Meet the Molder →Britain's Star Wars line, from the company that also made Action Man. Its Death Star is printed card because plastic cost too much, which is exactly why it is now the one collectors chase.
Meet the Molder →The toys about toys. Pull-string Woody and Buzz, straight from Pixar's first feature.
Meet the Molder →Anyone can sell an old toy. We want to tell you what you're actually looking at.
Year, maker, series, scale, accessories and condition. The details collectors actually want to know.
Who made it, when it appeared and what made it special. The story behind the plastic.
The original TV commercials that introduced these toys to the world, right where they belong.
The most coveted Star Wars playset in the world is made of cardboard. Not because anyone wanted it that way: Palitoy could not afford the plastic. That decision, taken in a Leicestershire factory in 1978, is why a British company most collectors outside the UK had never heard of now sits near the top of the list.
Alfred Edward Pallett founded the Cascelloid company in 1919, working in celluloid: combs, rattles, small moulded things. The toy side needed a name of its own, and the one he registered was his own surname with the job attached. Pallett, plus toy. Palitoy. It is printed on the back of every British Star Wars card and almost nobody reads it as what it is.
For decades the toys were a division rather than a company. Then in 1965 the toy operation at Coalville was separated out and given the Palitoy name properly, and in 1968 the parent company sold it to General Mills, the American food giant that had been quietly buying toymakers.
General Mills already owned Kenner and Parker Brothers. So when Kenner took the Star Wars licence in 1977 and could not make figures fast enough for the world, the British arm of the same parent company was the obvious place to send it. Palitoy did not win Star Wars in a bidding war. It inherited it through a corporate structure.
In 1966 Palitoy licensed Hasbro's G.I. Joe and rebuilt him for Britain as Action Man. What arrived was not a straight copy. Over the following years he collected the details British children actually remember: the flocked hair, the gripping hands, and the eagle eyes you moved with a lever in the back of his head.
By the late 1970s more than twenty million had been sold. Whatever else Palitoy did, this was the thing it did biggest, and it is worth holding onto when the Star Wars story takes over: the company that made the cardboard Death Star was, first and for longer, the company that made Action Man.
Kenner's Death Star Space Station was injection-moulded plastic, three storeys of it, and it was expensive to make. Palitoy costed the same toy for the British market and the numbers did not work: the tooling and the material were beyond what the division could spend on one playset.
So it was redrawn in printed cardboard. Same idea, same gun turret and lift and trash compactor, built out of card and a few plastic parts instead of a moulded shell. It went out cheap in 1978 and it was never sold anywhere but Britain.
Which is exactly why it is now the prize. Cardboard does not forgive damp lofts, sticky tape or children, so the ones that lasted are rare in a way an injection-moulded playset never is. Complete boxed examples in serious condition trade for thousands. The cheap version outlived the expensive one, and the compromise became the most wanted thing the company ever made.
The design department at Coalville closed in August 1984. On the first of May 1985 most of the work stopped: of 585 people in manufacturing and distribution, 327 were made redundant. What was left of Mainline Railways went to Dapol in South Wales the same year. In 1986 the Palitoy name stopped trading.
The building did not close with it. General Mills sold its toy business, and the Coalville site carried on under Kenner Parker, staffed in part by the same people, making toys for the company whose figures Palitoy had been licensed to produce. Tonka bought Kenner Parker in 1987 for $555 million. Hasbro closed the site in 1994.
In 2017 Leicestershire County Council put a green plaque on the business park that stands there now, for a company that, in its own words, helped stoke children's imaginations. It is the only thing on the site that says what used to be made there.
From celluloid combs to the British Star Wars line, and the slow handover to the company that had licensed it.
What came out of Coalville, from the one that sold twenty million to the one made of card.
G.I. Joe rebuilt for Britain, and the biggest thing the company ever sold. Twenty million by the late '70s.
The British line, on British cards, including the cardboard Death Star that was never sold anywhere else.
The small fashion doll, built at a scale that fitted a pocket rather than a shelf.
The model railway range. What was left of it was sold to Dapol as the factory wound down.
British spots, not the American ones. Every clip here was checked against its thumbnail before it went in, because a dead video id renders as a broken tile. They play inline; the title opens the clip on YouTube.
Our own reading of the toys, checked against the public record. Follow these if you want to go further than we did.
A private collection that grew into something bigger. This is where it comes from, and what we hunt for.
What began as a handful of childhood pieces turned into a hunt: for the odd, the overlooked and the wonderfully strange. The finding, the careful cleaning, the search for a missing weapon or a lost accessory, the stories behind each toy. Somewhere along the way the collecting became a way of living.
We are drawn to the weird ones. Toys that were played with, loved and actually handled, over the pristine pieces sealed and graded never to be opened again. A toy locked in plastic, never to be read or felt, becomes a frozen artifact. We would rather keep them alive.
Have a collection of your own? We buy and take on whole collections and single pieces. Tell us what you have, send a few photos, and we will look after it.
Upload a few clear photos. Our AI identifies the toy, dates it, checks the condition and builds the listing for you. It also reviews recent sales to suggest a fair starting price.
Identification is free. You only use a listing when you decide to sell.
Add clear photos of the front, back, accessories and any visible flaws. Include a close-up of the maker's stamp where possible.
You can also add your own source or a note of direction, either to point us at something you already trust or to have the identification double-checked against it.
A worn or partly legible stamp is fine.
Our AI reads the toy the way Hammer & Mold does, dating it from the moulded stamp rather than the box, then identifies the year, line and variant, grades the condition and reviews recent sales to suggest a price.
You see the identification, the sources, the condition, the pricing and the listing details before anything goes live. Change what you like, set your Reserve or Buy Now price, then approve the listing.
Toy identification is free and unlimited. Photograph anything and we will identify it, date it, show what originally came with it and grade its condition. You only pay when you list. Choose a package based on how much you sell, or let us work out which one costs you least.
You do not have to run an auction to get rid of a box of toys. Send us photographs, we tell you what it is worth, and we make you an offer for the lot. You post one parcel and we pay. No listing, no waiting, no wondering whether it sells.
We would rather you picked the right one than the one that suits us, so here is the arithmetic on a toy we think will fetch €30.
| On a toy worth about €30 | Sell it to us | Sell it through us |
|---|---|---|
| You receive | € 15,00 | € 25,50 |
| When | Within a week | After it sells |
| If it does not sell | Our problem | You still have it |
| Photographs, listing, packing | We do it | You do it |
| If it turns out to be rare | We keep the upside | You keep it |
The honest reason: assessing one toy and assessing forty costs us nearly the same in setup, so a whole collection is worth far more of our attention than a single common figure.
1. You send photographs. A few clear shots of what you have, laid out. For anything you think is worth something, add a close-up of the moulded stamp on the feet or the lower back: that text is what lets us date it and find what it really sells for.
2. We tell you what it is, before we make an offer. You get the identification either way, and you keep it whether you sell to us or not. If we think a piece is worth more than we would pay for it, we will say so and tell you to list it yourself.
3. We make one offer for the lot. Within two working days, with the reasoning attached: what we think each piece fetches and what we are paying for it. No haggling and no fishing.
4. You post it, we pay. We send you a prepaid label. Payment goes out the day the parcel arrives and matches the photographs. If something is not as described you get the parcel back at our cost, not a lower offer.
Photographs and a way to reach you. Nothing else needed, and nothing is committed by sending it.
Toy identification is always free and unlimited. Photograph anything and we will tell you what it is, who made it, when it was made and what condition it is in. You only pay when you sell. Choose a package based on how much you sell each month. Every package includes price research, buyer protection and live postage rates.
Tell us roughly how much you sell. We will compare the monthly fee and selling fee together and recommend the cheapest package.
Compare what buyer and seller pay together. On a €100 hammer price, Catawiki charges the seller 12.5% and adds another 9% buyer fee. The buyer pays €109 while the seller receives €87,50. Hammer & Mold adds no buyer fee. A €100 hammer price means the buyer pays €100.
| On a €100 hammer price | Buyer pays | Seller receives | Total platform fees |
|---|---|---|---|
| Catawiki | € 109,00 | € 87,50 | 21,5% |
| Hammer & Mold, Starter | € 100,00 | € 85,00 | 15,0% |
| Hammer & Mold, Trader | € 100,00 | € 88,00 | 12,0% |
| Hammer & Mold, Dealer | € 100,00 | € 92,00 | 8,0% |
A monthly package fee buys you a lower selling fee. Sell enough in a month and the saving becomes greater than the subscription. Sell less, and Starter is cheaper. The table shows the total cost of each package at different monthly sales volumes.
Live lots from this seller.
Identifying a toy is free and unlimited on every package. A listing is what costs a token. Every package includes the price research, buyer protection on every lot, and postage quoted live from the carrier.