A Two Penny Cartwheel With Rotated Reverse

You are quite right. "IANNIA" and "97" can be seen on the inside of the thicker half.
Someone did indeed destroy two 2d coins.

Cool...it makes you wonder what was hidden inside?

Yes. You'd have needed to destroy two coins to make an object like this, or the more modern "magicians coins" built in similar style.

A very interesting piece... the cartwheel has always been a favourite coin of mine... and sorry to say I destroyed one once (It was in awefull condition and I needed some copper... using mills I made it into plate, soldered silver plate to it, milled it chopped it in half and soldered together...repeated until I had about 50 layers...then I used a punch to make the surface uneven and filed it a little...then milled it more. What I ended up with was silver sheet with copper patterns all over it...but thats a different story)

Anyway, I imagine there is a fair amount of room in there; its a big coin, so I wonder what it was used to smuggle/hide. As a novelty item it probably still has some value too...

Sorry no pictures, and the metal was used long ago but I will explain a little more thoroughly.

A set of mills are like two rollers that can be used to flatten metal... if you imagine squashing the coin till it is about 1mm thick and then soldering a 1mm thick silver plate to it... now what you can do is mill it back to 1mm and cut it in half. Placing one half on top of the other solder it so it is 2mm thick again and then run it through the mills again till it is 1mm thick. The process of soldering it heats the metal to such a degree that it becomes soft again but if it begins to crack when going through the mills it is worth stopping and heating the metal again to soften it up.

Each time you do this you double the amount of layers...they get thinner and thinner but the sheet remains the same thickness (just composed of more layers)

Eventually you have 64 layers of metal, alternating copper and silver in a sheet 2mm thick.

By attacking it with a punch and a doming block you make it so some area's are higher than others and then use a heavy file to take a quarter of a mm off the surface (thus exposing the layers beneath... think of the odd shaped rings indicating height on a map, or pressure on a weather report)

Then by running through the mills again and bringing it down to a uniform 1mm you have a sheet of silver with copper patterns running all over the surface.

This was just an experimentation I did when I was an apprentice jeweller. You could do the same thing with rose gold and white gold and you could make many items from this sheet (I think I cut it into a heart shaped pendant on that occasion)

It was an interesting idea I think; but a cartwheel twopence died in order to complete that little experiment. For that I must apologise but where else was I going to lay my hands on 2 ounces of decent quality copper? The coin was bereft of any detail anyway...and I replaced it with a much better preserved one earlier this year :)

You taught me something DV, I didn't realise the process even had a name...its not something I have ever seen done elsewhere I think watching a chef make noodles inspired me.