I have only seen the dreaded Milk Spots on Canadian silver coins. Until your report above I had assumed this was unique to the process in the RCM or even perhaps because of the higher purity 9999 silver being more susceptible to something in the air. All my Phillies are bright and shiny with no spots or cloudiness anywhere. The common denominator here is Canada so is the cause of milk spots due to your clean air perhaps or depleted Ozone layer ?
Maples are just bullion coins - value is far more related to spot price than milk spots - get over it
My guess is the philharmonic tube was contaminated with air that had a higher relative humidity, as it is a known problem at this person's place. I bought 3 moose the other day to give away as gifts and one of them had an ugly and deep "v" shaped scratch in it. The coin was straight from a fresh tube at a RCM distributor. It should have been a reject. From my experience there is no difference in the quality of the wildlife series. There are a lot more Maples out there than the wildlife coins, which makes it pretty easy to say the maples are poorer quality, but you're exposed to so many more of them. I've seen new tubes of grizzlies with yellow milk spot covered coins visible through the tube. ...just saying...I'm over it.
I totally agree with rmp about the wildlife series , I have appx 40 including the wolf bear and cougar and all of mine have at least some spots, the wolves are the best and the spots are small and almost unnoticeable unless you look carefully , the worst are the bears to bad because they are my favorite of the series but in the right light they are coveredand look like crap and I have not found anything yet that will clean them. I wouldnt care about maples but on the wildlife series why pay the extra premium for crappy looking spotted coins. I have also only noticed the white spots on canadian , american and chinese coins, I have not noticed any on the australian coins so it must be something in the minting process or the refined planchets. I have though seen a sort of blurr spots on the Aus coins usually the queen side but it looks much different.
I have a brittania and a philoharmonic with milk spots but sadly canadian coins seem to be more prone to them. I don't really care too much if anything its a sign its not counterfeit!
I received an order of maples the other day and all of them have a whitish mark around the rim of the coin. I'm not overly fazed but I might try the rubber trick or some jewellery wipes if I get bored one day.
I got some wipes from ebay and tried on a Britannia and some Maples and I think they worked great on all my milkies. Amazing how much black shit comes off. Also brightened up some old Libs too.
