SKH-1c-1971D-18 Spiked Head

Description

Documented on January 4, 2018, SKH-1c-1971D-18 on the 1971-D Lincoln Memorial cent marks the point where spiked head discoveries for this date crossed into the new calendar year, with the late-2017 wave of catalog additions showing no signs of exhaustion. Attributed by Cuds on Coins, this eighteenth variety demonstrates that even after seventeen previously cataloged spiked heads, the 1971-D die population continued yielding new crack varieties to diligent examiners. The transition from December 2017 to January 2018 saw four additional spiked heads cataloged in a single session (SKH-18 through SKH-21 all share the same or adjacent documentation dates), suggesting a collector working through a substantial quantity of 1971-D cents and identifying new varieties at a steady rate. Each discovery at this depth in the catalog represents a die whose crack geometry differs measurably from all seventeen preceding entries — a level of diversity that reveals the random nature of fatigue crack propagation through die steel, where identical stress patterns applied to different dies produce different crack paths because each die's internal microstructure channels the fracture along its own unique path of least resistance.

Attribution History

• Discovered by Bob Byrd
• Cross reference: none. 01/04/2018.
• Expert attribution by Cuds on Coins

External References