CU-5c-1973D-01 Cud

Description

Opening the 1973-D Jefferson nickel cud registry, CU-5c-1973D-01 records a rim die break from Denver Mint production, cross-referenced as JNC-73D-6 in the Jefferson Nickel Cuds catalog. The 1973-D nickel had a mintage of 261.4 million pieces, continuing the robust output levels that characterized Denver's five-cent production throughout the early 1970s. The gap between the Cuds on Coins sequence number ("01") and the JNC cross-reference ("73D-6") illustrates how independent cataloging organizations encounter and assign numbers to the same varieties in different orders -- a common occurrence in numismatic attribution where multiple researchers work simultaneously on the same series. Cuds on early-1970s Denver nickels are well represented in the census because this era produced high volumes on equipment that was approaching mid-life in terms of press modernization, a combination that generated consistent die failure rates. The copper-nickel composition of the five-cent piece (unchanged since 1866 except for the wartime 1942-1945 silver alloy) creates a hard, wear-resistant planchet that extracts significant mechanical energy from each die strike. Over hundreds of thousands of impressions, this cumulative stress concentrates at the rim where the die meets the collar, and any pre-existing flaw, surface impurity, or grain boundary weakness in the die steel can nucleate a crack that propagates into a full rim fracture. The resulting cud -- a raised, design-free mass of metal -- persists as a permanent record of that failure event on every coin struck between the break and the die's retirement.

Attribution History

• Discovered by Fred Weinberg
• Cross reference number: JNC-73D-6.
• Expert attribution by Cuds on Coins

External References