Looking at the work of Russian artist Roman Booteen, it’s easy to see why people consider him a master at hand-engraving coins, but what most people don’t know is that many of his masterpieces also feature jaw-dropping mechanical surprises.

One of Roman’s latest creations is a prime example of why people  are so blown away by his skill. It’s a silver dollar featuring the  detailed carving of a knight and woman looking at a indentation on a wall. In a video posted on his Instagram, the artist reveals that the knight’s sword is actually removable and can be inserted into a little notch on the edge of the coin to slide open the wall indent and reveal a golden chalice. And this is just one of the cool things that Roman Booteen has made over the years.

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A man recently caused havoc at a car dealership in Tongren City, China, after turning up with a truck full of coins to buy a 480,000 yuan ($70,000) BMW.

The unnamed man apparently used to work as a bus driver and collected the coins during his many years on the job. Only instead of regularly exchanging them for larger denomination banknotes, he just kept them in his home, hoping to some day spend them on the car of his dreams. After seeing a new BMW that he really liked, the man decided that the time had come to exchange his sizable fortune for it, but only then realized that he had never even counted the coins. So he called some friends over and they spent four days counting them before loading them up in crates and driving to the car dealership.

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Imagine inheriting more money that you and your family could ever hope to carry. That’s exactly what happened to a family in Bremervörde, Germany, who received an inheritance of over 1.2 million coins weighing around 2.5 tonnes. In this particular case, however, counting the money proved a lot more difficult than carrying it.

It all started 30 years ago, when a German truck driver started saving  1 pfennig (0.01 Deutsche Mark) and 2 pfennig (0.02 Deutsche Mark) coins for his family. He managed to collect around 1.2 million coins until his death, earlier this year, all of which were inherited by his family. Now, Deutsche Marks haven’t been in circulation since 2002, but the Bundesbank  – the central bank of Germany – still exchanges the old currency, so the man’s family were still able to collect their inheritance. All they had to do was weight until the coins were all counted by hand. It took a while.

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Stacking coins in a simple tower can get pretty challenging after it reaches a certain size, but that’s child’s play compared to what this Japanese artist can create out of thousands of carefully placed coins.

Twitter user @thumb_tani has been delighting his fans with an array of physics-defying coin structures ever since he discovered the hobby, by mistake. He apparently started stacking coins out of boredom, and it just grew on him. He now spends hours at a time working on all sorts of crazy designs that seem ready to topple at any time, and posting the fruits of his work on social media. Some of his photos have gotten tens of thousands of likes, and looking at them, it’s easy to see why.

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A Chinese man made the news last week for building an incredible model of his hometown, using nothing but coins! He spent an entire month painstakingly stacking up ancient and modern coins from 11 different countries to create the model, complete with roads, bridges and skyscrapers. Believe it or not, he didn’t use any glue!

He Peiqi revealed that he used his contacts in the coin trading industry to collect tens of thousands of coins for his masterpiece. Once the coins were ready, he got to work on the floor of his apartment, kneeling for two long hours each day. He carefully stacked the coins to resemble the general layout of Chongqing City.

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This is what I call expensive art! While most artists spend money on art supplies, this Ukrainian man actually used money itself. 29-year-old chef Sergei Nikolayev Knurov fashioned a detailed miniature ship out of a variety of Ukrainian coins. The final piece contains a whopping 17,000 coins, with bank notes for sails.

Sergei, a resident of Mykolaiv city in southern Ukraine, first started the project with coins from his piggy bank. But he soon ran out of material – his personal stash only covered the keel. So he began to exchange paper money for coins whenever possible at drug stores and markets, and sometimes with friends. When people found out what the coins were meant for, they were glad to part with their loose change. The coins Sergei used are mainly 2 and 10 kopecks, and the sails are made of 25 five-hryvnia notes.

At first, it wasn’t easy for Sergei to actually create the 3 dimensional model of the ship using just his sketches and notes. But lucky for him, his wife Alena is an amateur numismatist (a person who studies and collects currency). She helped him fuse the coins together using silicate glue, which worked pretty well. Sergei said that using regular super glue could have resulted in oxidization, but this way the metal structure will last longer.

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A Dubai-based car tuning company aptly named Cars Coin has come up with an original way of giving luxury vehicles a unique look. They simply cover the cars in tens of thousands of modern and antique coins to make them “shine as if they were made of diamonds”.

It’s not easy making your car stand out in the UAE. It doesn’t matter if you drive the latest Ferrari, Lamborghini or Porsche, there are probably hundreds of others just like it lining the streets of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Covering your ride in gold foil is an option, but it’s been done more than once. Luckily, a group of tuning enthusiasts have come up with a new way to make expensive cars look unique. The guys at Cars Coin, an independent car workshop in Dubai, specialize in draping luxury cars in thousands of coins. Photos of their latest creation, a 2013 Range Rover draped in no less than 57,412 old Dirham coins have been making the rounds on the internet, during the last few days. Cars Coin artists spent weeks shinning the coins and gluing each one by hand to the body of the car. According to some sources, this extra metal layer added another 170 kilos to the weight of the luxury SUV. Just to make sure no one is tempted to steal the coins, the tuners used old Dirham coins that are no longer in circulation. But it’s not like most people in the UAE need small change, anyway.

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Johnny Swing is a very original furniture designer who decided to give literal meaning to the phrase “sitting on cash” by building a series of sofas and chairs out of thousands of coins.

His latest creation, entitled “All the King’s Men” was made out of thousands of 50-cent coins, which makes it not only ridiculously uncomfortable, but also insanely expensive. Each coin was welded to a steel frame, which obviously takes a lot of patience, but considering Johnny has done it a few times before, it probably wasn’t that much of a problem.

While it’s not the kind of comfortable furniture you’d want to slouch on when you get home from work, Johnny Swing’s coin sofa is definitely something to look at, especially knowing that owning it is actually illegal in many countries.

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