SKH-1c-1973D-10 Spiked Head

Description

Documented on December 29, 2023, by the Cuds on Coins attribution team, SKH-1c-1973D-10 brings the spiked head count for the 1973 Denver Lincoln Memorial cent to ten documented varieties. No cross-references to external attribution services have been assigned. The December 2023 date follows the ninth entry by approximately ten months (February 2023), suggesting continued periodic searching and discovery by collectors engaged with this date. Reaching a count of ten distinct spiked head dies for a single date-mint combination is a notable milestone that few dates in the Lincoln Memorial cent series achieve. It reflects the convergence of several factors: the enormous 1973-D mintage (approximately 3.55 billion pieces) that required hundreds of obverse dies, the sustained high-speed production that stressed those dies to their fatigue limits, and the dedicated community of variety collectors who have systematically searched through the surviving population over many years. SKH-1c-1973D-10's attribution required the Cuds on Coins team to verify that its spike's geometry — angle, length, width, base position, and curvature — did not match any of the nine previously documented entries. This differentiation becomes increasingly challenging as the catalog grows, since the range of possible spike geometries for a given die design is constrained by the fixed location of the portrait apex and the limited range of angles at which cracks can viably propagate through the die steel. Each new entry confirmed at this stage represents genuine additional documentation of the 1973-D die population's failure history.

Attribution History

• Discovered by Mitch Wilkinson
• Cross reference: none. 12/29/2023.
• Expert attribution by Cuds on Coins

External References