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I know not many collect Models ,however you will have to believe me that they are really hard to find in high grade and problem free.Most have been messed about with , cleaned ,played with or not stored properly. They are easy to buy for not much money but not easy to find in this grade 😃

Hey Jerry, if you want another project perhaps you can stitch this one back together and then re-engrave....now that we all know what a wizard you are with the needles!

No, that was not noted. It is still a variety that can creep under the radar, though it looks like a number of us had spotted it. Jerry

Maybe that a tip on how to become rich by richtips86

Ian was very lucky with this coin in that there was a remarkably good surface preserved under the verdigris (green areas) and under the oxide (brown areas). Held to the light, the field almost prooflike, and had I stripped the whole coin to a reactive surface and then evenly toned , this sheen would have been lost so I decided to tone through the existing, which could be taken further over time. When I first saw the coin the verd looked almost waxy, and I wondered whether there was an organic element, so I tried a couple of organic solvents - acetone, DMSO, petrol- which had no effect on the verd but did at least remove any contaminants that might have blocked the verdicare. Under the microscope it was clear that all the discoloured areas of the coin has experienced corrosion, being both very hard and adherent. Working each side sequentially, reverse first, it took about a day of Verdicare to start to soften the corrosion and enable a gentle picking off with the needle, in tiny plaques; I had to take this very slowly in sessions of an hour or so, microscope work is hard on the eyes and neck. I suspect it took 15 to 20 hours of microscope time. The fields were mostly done with the polished tip steel needle, he detail particularly the denticles with an orange needle on insulin syringe (courtesy of our late diabetic cat). I was always working through a thin layer of Verdicare. A very steady hand is needed, and pressure on the verd rather than the coin. There was a good cleavage plane of reddish oxide on the surface of the coin, which helped a lot. My feeling is that the coin, while not perfect of course, has come out better than I expected Jerry

Even back in 1927 in the auction?? Or indeed even when it was done (presumably) in Victorian times? Not a lot of money has been made with it if Seaby sold it for £20 back in 1992 and I paid £25 in 2021 !! Must have taken many hours to produce, so a good deal below the minimum wage! Anyway, a nice curio...

Easy answer, to get money i would say. Always a chance that somebody would pay silly money.

I can't work out how it's done anyway- did someone tool the area flat, and then somehow remove a '0' from another penny and somehow fix it on? Surely 'tooling' implies removing material, yet to do a '0' requires adding material?