Del Stubbs has an excellent reputation. The straight Mora/Eric Frost carving knives (106 & 120) use laminated steel (Rockwell 59 & 62 I think) and can be purchased at reasonable prices, they seem as good as a woodcarving knife needs too be. I'm not so keen on the Mora hook-knives but they do the job. Actually, I haven't found a spoon knife that I am happy with yet - I have a Mora 164 and the highly rated HK spoon knife, which is very good in many ways but I often find the curve a bit too uniform & the bottom a bit too deep & flat to do what I want to do (perhaps just my my lack of experience, still haven't made many spoon) - my spoons all seem to end up with deep egg-shaped bowls

. I would like to try a shallower spoon knife, with a different curve shape/geometry - maybe something by Nic Westerman/Ben Orford/SD/etc. (or Del Stubbs in the USA).

106
I recently purchased one of the wider Mora "Classic" Sloyd knives (below), the smallest one 2/0 (dinky like a pen knife in size) I like it a lot but haven't done much with it yet - mine was reasonably priced (from MoonrakerKnives.co.uk) but doesn't have a laminated steel blade

; Mora do offer their sloyd/classic knives with laminated steel blades

but unfortunately at a huge premium

. However, I have a couple of cheap but good Mora Clipper utility/buscraft knives which are just carbon steel and they take and hold an edge remarkably well.

Classic 2/0
Re. silver maple, member BullDawg (Phil) has done some beautiful stuff with maple which has that amazing 3-D figuring effect.