Let me clear things up a bit:
In the original release of the Thomas line, all the engines (until Duck) had their faces moulded into the smokebox. The smokebox was moulded black, and they painted the face section gray. Around 2002/3, they began retooling them to where the face was a separate piece, being moulded gray and then screwed/glued onto the smokebox. Percy was the last to be updated, and I would guess around 2006 was when he finally received the update. There are in fact some cases of the other engines with the gray running plate with the painted face (which I would assume would be TOMY getting rid of leftover assets), but I'm unable to find any pictures at the moment. In the US, you couldn't get a TOMY Percy with a seperately moulded face until right before the HiT toy era. The same occurred in Japan, thus the variant I'm after.
In this image it's very obvious that the face is painted rather than separately moulded:

The eBay listing I linked was to show that they changed the face design during the T-6 release.
In short, I'm simply looking for a regular Japanese Percy that was released before they changed the face. Perhaps anybody who's bought lots from Jauce could check their collection and see if they have any of this variant in their spares to see what I mean?
For further clarification, here's what mine looks like. You can see why I'm trying to find a better one, haha.
