I was recently to make these calls by Keith Mark, who hosts MacMillan River Adventures, a hunting TV show on the Outdoor Channel. I've made calls for Keith before and have had the privelege to have my calls featured on his show. I contacted him a year ago and asked if he'd give my calls a try. As it turned out, he lives not far from me and his day job office is in the same little city I live in...So he was at my house a week later. He recently emailed me and told me that he's the celebrity guide for the annual Kansas governor's turkey hunt...Quite a big event. He asked that I make a couple calls, one for him and one for the governor to commemorate the hunt. He'll be presenting the call to the gov at the banquet that celebrates the event later this month, and they'll use the calls on the hunt. Regardless of their politics, KS governors go hunting at this event for 24 straight years (NWTF TV showed Kathleen Sebelius taking a bird a couple/few years back), which is pretty cool.
So I guess this is kind of a gloat. Pretty proud to have been asked to do this for the governor. The good PR never hurts either!
The calls are claro walnut. The gov's call is pretty highly figured, and Keith's has some nice curl but isn't quite as spectacular (didn't have two pieces of the really cool stuff). The surfaces are anodized aluminum. I had a local engraver do the lettering, and of course the engraved the wrong (unblasted) side.
So I beadblasted the big gray area on the surfaces to make them functional. The strikers are claro walnut and pecan. Each call has two inlays and each striker has three...The inlays are brass key machine shavings from the hardware store in clear inlace resin. Subtle but it catches the light nicely. I finished the calls with three coats of waterlox and buffed out the shine of the last coat with 0000 steel wool and applied a coat of furniture wax. So they're not super glossy...More of a hand rubbed look, which is what I was going for.
