Link

From an ebay auction.

Pretty interesting though - would this mean the early Canadian settlers actually used British pennies to test their dies???

I expect the price to go pretty mad

That's a very interesting piece. I'm going to keep an eye on it.

It has been pressed into an 1859 Canada Cent, done much much later than 1776.

1) I'm pretty sure the 1/2d itself is a contempoary counterfeit
2) A large cent has been hammered into the halfpenny.

This type of thing is often done on U.S. large cents to turn culls into a (badly damaged) piece of junk which is then passed off as an error to unsuspecting bidders for sometimes hundreds of dollars.

BTW, the Canadian cent used is post-1876

A British cent? There's such a thing?

As Mr Spock would say 'calling an 18th century English penny a cent is illogical.'

If the halfpenny is 1776 then it is definitly a contemporary counterfeit. I can't tell from the image if it is a 75 or 76. It does look a lot like a 6 which would tend to indicate that either way it is a contemporary counterfeit. (The counterfeiters were not sure whether or not they were going to strike 1776 halfpence so they made the 5 on their later dies in a style that could be easily mistaken for a 6.) The Canadian cent impressions are simply a hammer job where someone has overlapped the British piece with the Canadian cent and hit it with a sledgehammer. Notice that the lettering is incuse and backwards. This isn't an error, just a multilated coin.