Milk Spots- Are They Such a Big Deal?

Oh, but it is. It is your claim that your coin has "milk spots". PROVE IT! Or hang it up!

 

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Never said it was. Just shared it for what I consider may be related and to get comments/thoughts about it. As soon as I posted it Doug says it is not but he can't prove it, hence its his problem and you're just the distraction to his malady to help him get away with not providing his proof which has nothing to do with knowledge as he'd have you believe in his slight of hand argument style of hucksterism.

 

So you agree with Doug that they are not milk spots. Good! So now it is done and over.

 

You keep missing my drift. Let's assume that there is a method to remove milk spots. The method is in the hands of the person who discovered it. A person has paid strong money for a PCGS graded silver eagle coin whose value was largely in the label and not the coin. Let's say it develops milk spots after a year. The owner of the coin wishes to have it conserved and kept in/returned to the holder in which it currently resides. The only place that can assure the owner that his requirements would be met is PCGS. If you or I crack it out, clean it and send it to PCGS, there is no assurance that PCGS will holder it at all, much less to the way it was before you or I messed with it. I'd guess that 99% or more of the spotted ASEs aren't worth the effort/cost it would take to fix them. There are plenty of replacement coins available. IMO if you had a method of spot removal, you'd be better off to sell it to PCGS [if they'd even still want it] than try and make a go of it on your own.

 

No. As stated previously, I am merely open to the idea that they may not be but Doug has no way of proving to us that they are or are not and when asked to do so he refuses to because he can't prove that non circular spots are not. The ball remains in his court to make "Good" before its "done and over".

 

I'm not missing anything. you would just take a different approach to selling the discovery even if it's something the grader would still pay for. My advice earlirr was simply not to sell ones self out too short on such a discovery and shopping the idea around could prove more lucrative if not creating ones own service entirely out of such (hypothetical at this point) conservation scheme.

 

This topic was a really big deal on the PCGS forum about 15 years back. I'll bet there were a hundred threads on the topic. My opinion on what a milk spot is falls in line with what folks agreed on at that time.
With that said, my opinion falls in line with Doug. The only coin posted in this thread with milk spots is the image Doug posted. That's the look of what folks agreed on as being milk spots.

 

Yep, it's an old discussion and because the condition is unresolved it usually ends in a divided mess.

Anyone is entitled to their opinions and anyone can join a mob or join a side to become one rallying behind their buddies in a fight if they so choose, but it still does not prove that Doug is right that milk spots are only circular. Without that proof and given his reluctance and inability to share anything to support it, its not without running some risk standing behind such an opinion as his. And when it comes to his concept of sharing knowledge, he just defers people to other research, other books and takes no steps nor makes any attempt to inform others what he says he knows and attempts to imply is fact.

 

I don't see how anyone could offer proof on either side of the debate.
I guess we all form our opinions on what the years have taught us to believe. Right or wrong.

 

Well you have to consider market potential. Nobody is going to pay you or me to conserve a graded coin if they can't get it reholdered exactly like it was. Only the grading company can guarantee that. By not being able to do graded coins, you'd cede a substantial amount of potential business. A 1995-W PCGS PR70 DCAM proof ASE sold on Great Collections for over $80K. If that spots, do you think the owner/fool would send it to either of us for conservation? Nobody is going to pay good money to fix a spotted coin from a tube of 2004 coins as long as unspotted examples are freely available. Possibly a licensing arrangement could be worked out.

 

Say what? I've posted pics of spotted coins; one of which was really ugly.

 

I was hoping this thread might morph into a discussion/summation of what people have done to identify what the white spots are and hopefully to suggest ways the could be removed or at least what people have tried and any success they have had.

All we seem to have is speculation with little or basis in fact. If salt spray was responsible, don't you think that crap would be all over everything at PCGS and not just a few select silver coins? Sheesh, if you know anything about chemistry you know that silver doesn't react with hydrochloric acid, much less reacting with saline. If it was simply deposited on the coins, it should just as simply wash off.

It's been said that when the Mint started restriking silver dollar coins back in 1921, that they made a change in the way that they washed the planchets and included hydrochloric acid or replaced another washing agent with HCl. This was/is said the be largely responsible for the fact that year 1921 Morgans and all Peace dollars tone differently than Morgan dollars and that Peace dollars were plagued with spotting problems.

The thing is that nobody knows exactly the entire process at any of the mints or the steps that could result in spotting. At one time I was in contact with the head QC person for the Mint. They were aware that chloride was the major culprit causing the spotting on silver eagles.

It seems that unless it's been already done, a study of the spots on a variety of spotted coins should be done. Coins from mint tubes, various slabs, etc. look for a common contaminant or contaminants. I would suggest using ESCA aka XPS as a preferred tool.

Seems like it could be a good thesis project for someone in chemistry or possibly metallurgy.

 

The point I was trying to make in my research on over 1,000 SEM/EDS spectrographs choride and sulfur ions were present on the coins surface virtually 100% of the time whether with copper, brass, silver, gold or any other metal. The AgCl was already seen in a SEM/EDS spectrogrpah in this thread. Silver at this purity has a very reactive surface to air contaminants even at ppm levels. The correct preservative is required. Its irrelevant if HCL is used anymore. The shape of the white spots is irrelevant. Prevent the buildup of AgCL in the PMD arena and you solved this problem. Its a new alloy giving these Mints problems.
You are aware on what causes fingerprint residues/impressions on coin surfaces? Holding a coin on the edge has little value. What is the composition of human sweat? On your fingertips?

Your up Bajjerfan - let's party ...

 

All that's important to most folks is that you can't see any foreign junk on the coin when you look at it. A spot-free coin vs a milk spotted one is all people care about.
The fact that there may be some adventitious contaminants doesn't really matter. Gross contaminants which are conspicuous by their presence are another matter. If you can see them they're a problem, if you can't see them they're not. It's as simple as that. The Mint also produces a lot of clean coins. Until someone provides evidence to the contrary, my take is that milkspots are due to the presence silver chloride which is an artifact of the production process.

It was interesting when I was having the XPS analysis done on a spotted coin that the gentleman commented about how "dirty" the coin was at least in terms of stuff volatile under ultra high vacuum. It took him awhile to get it down to a suitable working vacuum.

 

Larry I think you missed Bajjerfans pic on page 7 , Post 137 .

 

Bajjerfan - a production by-product on the surface is respectable enough. The high vacuum is required in XPS is needed so the lighter elements like chlorine and sulfur can be measured like in a SEM/EDS analysis. It really has nothing to do with how clean or dirty the surface of a coin is prior to analysis. Certain coins are polished to get a more represenative alloy under the aged patina. To measure using XPS it needs to be done in a vacuum so the lighter elements do not impart false readings on the heavier metals like silver.

But remember your toned Morgan Dollar in your pic is PMD with atmospheric sulfur as described per White's Coin Chemistry book - as simple as that treatise was with this collector. Your one? XPS witness test I guess prevents you to also visualize chlorine as another atmospheric contaminant or another form of PMD.

XPS is a surface chemical analysis technique that can be used to analyze the surface chemistry of a material in its as-received state, or after some treatment, for example: fracturing, cutting or scraping in air or UHV to expose the bulk chemistry, ion beam etching to clean off some or all of the surface contamination (with mild ion etching) or to intentionally expose deeper layers of the sample (with more extensive ion etching) in depth-profiling XPS, exposure to heat to study the changes due to heating, exposure to reactive gases or solutions, exposure to ion beam implant, exposure to ultraviolet light.

John Lorenzo
Numismatist
United States

 

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It was posted earlier too. I reposted it on page 7 as an example of how to upload a pic which another posted wanted to know how to do.

 

Exactly! Which is why Doug is wrong to state something as factual.

 

Still , whatever side your on . Your little vendetta is getting old with me and I'm sure a few others . Don't you think a reasonable person would drop it already . I'm reading this thread to learn something about the chemistry that they are talking about not to come back and hear you rant about Doug every other post .

 

No one I s making you read or reply here. Its not that hard to skim content to get what you came here for so stop crying to me about it. It's no vendetta either. Doug failed and tried in vain to spin his way out of it and all of those bemoaning the direction of the thread ought to redirect the problem to the catalyst himself, Doug. Make him own up to his claims and it's over instead of arguing with me for simply asking him to explain himself when he clearly has no proof and only an opinion his reputation is riding on. You reply to me about this and you just make what you say you want to avoid prolonged by being part of it. I guess you're neither reasonable nor cognizant of your actions going by the conclusions you drew in this post.