It's not exactly a
work of art. I don't think Abraham
Lincoln would be very proud. I drew the outline of the picture onto the penny with a felt tip pen and then etched it out with a
fine point
bit. Then I carved everything away that didn't look like the
Constans portrait I was trying to copy. For the
reverse, I thought I'd do something different, so I made a rider on a
horse, but soon tired of my project because I kept sneezing with all the metal dust flying up in my
face.
For those of you wondering, No... I do not,
nor have I ever
tooled a coin. This was just an experiment to see what I could do with a penny and a dremel tool. The problem is there is just not enough metal thickness in a modern coin to make an ancient "hobo
nickel" with the proper relief. I carved too deep, and when it accidentally dropped on the floor, the
inscription broke off of one
side.
My adventure in fakery
had to include a
fake patina, so I started by using a black permanent marker to "paint" the coin. This was too obvious, so I distressed the coin by rubbing between two other modern coins. This gave the look of wear, but the highlights were too bright. I held the coin above a candle high enough to not burn the coin, but collect the black soot. The carbon from the candle soot is just enough, after wiping it with a rag, to tone down the shiny metal and make the marker look more like
patina and less like ink.
I didn't set out to produce a
fake coin that could fool anyone, just to see how difficult it would be to carve one, like the ancient die engravers. All told, it took about an hour to produce this coin. I wonder, with no power
tools, how long it took to engrave a die - to much better standards than this.
Regards,
Danny