Why Has Noone Thought Of This

I hope you are not talking about using a 3d printer to make a replica, that would be illegal unless the coin was marked as such.

Yes I'm talking about replicas. They could be marked. Lime green whatever. And sold as singles or sets. Learning disabilities etc.. hands on learning tool

If he is referring to 3D printing, I doubt he understands the technology.

I don't think 3-D printers can work in metal at coin-sized scale yet. When they can, I think it would be the death-knell for coin collecting due to the influx of easy counterfeits. You'd need to make the models super-sized to retain the fine details, which might be great for some in-person demonstrations like at a seminar or coin club meeting, but kind of inconvenient for personal use.

If you're wanting to make 1:1 sized replicas of coins, there are cheaper and easier methods than 3-D printing. Old-fashioned pressure casting, for example, would work well enough for the purpose. You'd lose a little detail, but not as much as a 3-D printer.

There's the whole "counterfeit coins" angle to consider. To sell them legally, they would need to be stamped "COPY" to comply with the Hobby Protection Act. You couldn't sell them on ebay due to ebay's blanket ban on copies and replicas. Plus, of course, the forum would be flooded for years to come by people who found grampa's set of replica error coins and thought they were real (no matter how carefully they were marked otherwise).

Finally, you're kind of missing the point on why so many of these people are coming onto the forum lately with their non-error coins. Many of them are get-rich-quick free-money-for-nothing kinds of folks, who see on the news or YouTube or wherever somebody making a fortune selling error coins, and they want a piece of the action. These people are not interested in "learning tools" and certainly aren't going to be wanting to buy sets of replica errors, to improve their error collecting - they're trying to find a way to make free money, without having to work hard, think hard or spend money first.

before coin photography became viable at home people would make foil pressing of their coins to share with other collectors. here are some pressings that I have in my collection.



the gallery mint used to offer seminars on error coins. they would show you how they were made and let you make some yourself. here are some error tokens from their 2002 class at the ANA summer seminar. I made some of them myself

Agree with jimbucks. Gotta build that CAD model--not a trivial endeavor.

Didn't know about the foin pressing. That is very cool... And I wasn't thinking it had to be metal. A larger plastic stamped replica version would do the trick just as well I think.